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CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 





The Baker & Taylor Company 
New York 





The Cambridge University Press 
London 


The Maruzen-Kabushiki-Kaisha 
Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Fukuoka, Sendai 


The Mission Book Company 
Shanghai 








CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


cA Modern I. nter pretation 


By/ 
GEORGE CROSS 





THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 


<Sh OF Phings iy 
OCT 22 2525 


rY> 


Copyright 1925 by 
The University of Chicago 


All rights reserved 


Pubbshsd Warch: 1925 


Composed and Printed by 
THE DU BOIS PRESS 
Rochester, New York, U.S. A. 


TO THE MEMORY OF MY PARENTS 





PREFACE 


Protestantism is four centuries old. It came to the 
birth by a revolution that shook the structures of western 
European civilization to the foundations. On the religious 
side, Protestantism appeared as a child of the Cathol- 
icism against which it arose in vigorous protest. In its 
inner character it constituted a critical reconstruction of 
the Christian faith of which Catholicism seemed a misin- 
terpretation and perversion. In the course of half a 
century there emerged a Protestant morality, Protestant 
modes of worship, Protestant church systems and Protest- 
ant forms of doctrine—all of these more or less truly 
organic to the promotion of that faith of which they were 
interpretations. It is with the last of these four modes of 
Protestant self-expression we are here concerned. 

All the early Protestant theologians were at first mem- 
bers of the Roman Catholic Church and received their 
intellectual training in her schools. If, then, we discover 
that the presuppositions and the modes of reasoning by 
means of which they built their own doctrines were, in 
the main, derived from earlier Catholic thought, it can 
be no cause of surprise. Moreover, the very doctrines 
themselves which they advocated in opposition to 
Catholic views and practices, were largely based on 
grounds that they held in common with their opponents. 

Four hundred years of Protestant life have wrought 
great changes in our ways of thinking. For example, some 
doctrines (such as the foreordination of the elect few to 
everlasting blessedness, while the rest of mankind are 
passed by) that were once believed to be of divine author- 
ity and a mainstay to faith, have become a serious incubus 


Vii 


viii Preface 


to the spirit of the Protestant who professes to accept 
them and a stumbling stone to enquirers. Some others 
that were thought permanent portions of the dwelling- 
place of faith, have turned out to be temporary scaffold- 
ing and necessarily to be dispensed with in the interest 
of the faith itself. The fact is, the Protestant Christian 
faith has been for some time in course of reinterpretation. 
And necessarily so. 

It is not alone the trained theologian or the educated 
minister of the Gospel that is aware of this, but multitudes 
of thoughtful laymen as well. It is particularly true of 
great numbers of the young people who. have passed 
through our colleges and universities out into the active 
business of life. The self-devotion to a high purpose that 
is needed to sustain them in life’s great tasks needs a 
better support than can be found in the traditional 
creeds. In no instance is this more evident than in the 
case of the doctrine of salvation. 

The aim of this treatise is not primarily apologetical 
but evangelistic. Apologetical it is, since it maintains 
that the Christian faith is true to the great realities of 
life and to the world in which our lives must be invested. 
But the theoretical vindication of one’s beliefs is quite 
subsidiary to the great self-commitments to which we 
all are called. The finest demonstration of the worth of 
our faith is given by living it. The great tests are the 
practical. Life is a hazard, a venture. Religious faith is a 
challenge to make the venture without reservation. My 
readers are hereby invited to respond to the Christian 
challenge with an acceptance. 


GEORGE Cross 
RocHEsTER, New YorK 
January 1, 1925 


CONTENTS 


Page 

PREFACE CE LN a eR IY eR RMAC Sy i Bet afi bet a ot woh (9) NE 
Chapter 

I. THE QUESTION ithe) at Mi ict aabea ba A NOT ees nN INNA Sod OY ( 

1. The Universal Longing Pkt A RIN ECA A Nae Ta Oe 1 

Ze ene; Cleavage in’ Our: Life Wocw) 2 hake nisl bere Cele 5 

Pee LUG LeSUO Day uLau re Our Aer en Ade mcm Eoin) Ya ital OUR ant Ree 

II. AN EARLY CHRISTIAN ANSWER... .. ..= 18-41 

1. The Markan Interpretation . . . . . . . 22 

2A che wukan Interpretation: 177 ie ie Mauls eet a are 

3. The Matthaean Interpretation . . ary eta 2 

4, An Estimate of the Early Christian veoh Rye A ties 

III. THE CHRISTIAN JEW TOTHEGREEK .. . 42-69 

1. The First Stage—Pauline . . .. «0 3 3 es 48 

(1) Paul’sSecret .. . 45 

(2) The Crucified—the Beserenes ‘of Moral Renee! 53 

(3) The Appealtothe Greek . ..... . 58 

2. The Second Stage—Johannine Sa ema era het Ok 

3. Comment PEA MEN AAS th akc Ceri esta Mk aati FR 6 

IV. CATHOLIC SACRAMENTALISM... . . .. .. 70-90 

1. The Eastern (Greek) Way of Salvation . . . . 72 

2. The Western Hecenga ys Catholic ayaa OU ara Hoan ae E 

Siz JVOTOMONE. pave Ne PAL HOLA teey cach miu REE I PE 

VEO Lig CAN LEARNS U LANGE. (A Sie Wout fale eked LE 

1. The General Framework of Protestant Doctrine . 93 

2. The Inner Certainty of a Right Relation to God . 102 

3. The Basis of the Protestant Interpretation . . . 108 

_ VI. THE MODERN PROTESTANT POINT OF VIEW 112-1338 

1. The Personal Experience of the Better Life. . . 114 

2. The Developing Community Life of Protestants . 124 

3. The Deepening Insight into Cosmic Relations . . 129 


1x 


x Contents 


VI. THE BASIC APEIRMATION Hi Ginn boa LOU 
1. The Significance of the Advent of Personality . . 135 
2. The Progressive Fulfilment of Personality . . . 145 
3. The Worth of the Life Movements of Humanity . 153 
VII SINVAND FORGIVENESS Die ea an eek ako 
1. The Meaning of Sin S11) Ca aie) oa ts wT An 
2. The Cansés of Sinning 2) sik) va ee eee 
3. The Meaning of Forgiveness . . .. . . . 169 
TX ATON BM EN eg ieuieell tee ee ae certo Wet) ta ar SN Pear 
1. Modern Conception of Government .... . . 182 
2: he Meaning of (Guiltvns nate aan ia ne 
3. The’ Meaning of Punishment (2) 20) eo 
4. The Meaning of Justification . . . . . . . 201 
5. The Meaning of Atonement . . . . . . . 208 
A. THE SAVED COMMUNIDYs yi aie tu apa) sancti Ae eo 
1. The Universal Relation Between the Community 
andthe Individual . . AD hicy by? tf 
2. Christian Faith and Commie eit nent Mae a PY 
3. The Christian Contribution to a Higher Order of 
Humanity iy Sik eae NE a Pe ee 
XI. THE WORLD TO COME . . . Bats; 40 eee 
1. The Basis of the Hope of a Life After Death . . 239 


2. The Significance of the Personality of Jesus - | Paeee 


CHAPTER I 


THE QUESTION 


The term salvation is not often heard in places of 
business or of industry, on the street or in ordinary 
social intercourse, but it is in constant use in the place 
of worship. The idea of salvation pertains to religion. 
But this does not mean that it has no natural place in 
our ordinary affairs, or is an exclusively religious term 
in the narrow sense. For religion is not a luxury enjoyed 
by the few and denied to the many. It is not something 
added to the ordinary life of humanity. It would be much 
nearer the truth to say that the whole meaning of the 
lives of men is summed up in their religion and finds 
expression there. Now, the soul of any man’s religion is 
found in his hope of salvation. A message of salvation 
always appeals powerfully to people because it claims 
to satisfy the longings that give to their life its true 
character and worth. 


I. MEN UNIVERSALLY LONG FOR A BETTER STATE 


The various religions are not merely so many different 
kinds of belief or speculations about things seen and 
unseen. They exhibit the means by which men, the world 
over and all ages through, have sought to obtain some- 
thing which seems to them worth more than all else. 
Religious faith never arises out of disinterested reflec- 
‘tion, or contemplation. It is always instinct with passion. 
It takes the field in the hard battle of life when the air 


1 


2 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


seems full of death and men feel the need of a Mightier 
to help. It is a confession of a conscious weakness, a felt 
inability on their part to cope unaided with forces that 
threaten or imperil their well-being, while at the same 
time it reveals their strength and true worth. Religion 
is born of struggle and thrives best in the midst of it. 

1. No man is exempt from these conditions. Throughout 
the whole of life we are all affected by the hope of good or 
the fear of ill. We are never at rest, much as we should 
like to be. Our spirits are ever in unstable equilibrium. 
Life is never awanting the spice of danger, never without 
its lure of blessing. There is always a heaven to seek, a 
hell to shun. The moment we exclaim, ‘‘Peace and safety,” 
sudden destruction falls upon us. The Son of Man is 
always coming at a time when we expect him not. Seis- 
mographers say that a period of freedom from minute 
disturbances of the earth’s crust often portends a sudden 
and violent earthquake. Bacteriologists tell us that in 
our physical system, all unfelt at most times, there are 
constant encounters between beneficent and malignant 
forces and our life always hangs by a thread. Riches 
still take wings and fly away. The battle against vio- 
lence, disease, poverty and sin is incessant. Furloughs in 
this warfare are short and come but seldom. 

2. The growth of civilization does not seem to lessen our 
cares. Civilized peoples do not take life easily. It may be 
that by reason of improvidence and frequent wars life 
among savage people is always full of hazard and haunted 
by fears, and that the more stable conditions of civilization 
ordinarily diminish the sense of these dangers. But 
when warfare does break out between civilized peoples 
all the demons held in leash by the common bonds of 


THE QUESTION 3 


society seem to break loose in more malignant form than 
ever. Scientific skill imparts to the struggle and the 
calamities that accompany it an intensity and range 
unknown to barbarians. The sense of insecurity and the 
desire for deliverance from it are commonly felt by the 
wealthy no less than by the poor, no less by the intelli- 
gent than by the ignorant. While the forms the danger 
takes may very well be different, the pain of it may 
even be accentuated, and the longing for relief may be 
deeper. The possession of wealth or learning, so far from 
bringing exemption, may turn out to be very costly in 
this regard. The cry, ‘‘What must I do to be saved ?’’ is, 
with varying degrees of meaning, universal. A message 
of salvation will always be welcome. In a world like ours 
men will never cease to sigh and cry for a Gospel able to 
comfort the fearful and to heal broken hearts. Is there, 
then, a universal Gospel to match the universal need? 
Of course, one may seem to stand outside the area of 
our common struggles and say, “These weird terrors have 
their source in human ignorance and crude fancy. True 
knowledge is always able to disperse them. There is but 
one supreme force working irresistibly everywhere. We 
cannot alter the nature of things if we would and, in the 
end, we would not if we could. The world rightly goes on 
its way irrespective of our desires or efforts to change its 
course.’ But we do well to remember that besides this 
supposedly external world that has no regard for our 
feelings we have to do with the world of inward human 
experience. This world of human inner life, with all its 
good or ill, as it appears to our minds, is a very real 
world. He who professes to stand outside of it thereby 
admits that he excludes himself from any real experience 


4 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


of its meaning. Only those who actually enter in spirit 
into the deep travail of human life, can be trusted to 
gain a true insight into its mystery. And so, without 
arguing the matter further, we cling to the simple posi- 
tion that, if human experience be a true witness, our life 
is full of real hazards. The helpful and the harmful in 
reality and in prospect confront us everywhere. It is only 
the indolent, the indifferent and the coward who feel no 
concern. 

3. The annals of all peoples attest the cardinal relation 
of our subject to the life of mankind. All nations set apart 
certain days in commemoration of past .deliverances. 
They erect monuments to their saviors and hold them in 
everlasting remembrance. They do honor to the forms of 
religion that constitute the means of salvation. No matter 
how philosophical or speculative the doctrines of the 
different religions, they all have this practical interest 
ultimately in view and are intended to guard it. On this 
account they differ greatly in character from scientific 
inductions or purely philosophical interpretations. These 
purposely rule out the personal interest for the sake of 
exactness within the limited field of investigation under- 
taken at the time. Accordingly, purely scientific inductions 
or doctrines of philosophy never excite the same hot feel- 
ings as are associated with the doctrines of religion or, at 
least, not until their bearing on the religious interest is 
made clear. Religious doctrines are invariably the product 
of men’s attempts to gain assurance of the certainty of 
their hopes of ultimate good. This is true even of the 
doctrine of the existence and nature of God. 

On account of the limits deliberately set by science to 
its scope, the attempt to use the idea of God as a purely 


THE QUESTION 5 


scientific hypothesis would surely confuse the issue. It 
is different in the case of religion. Religion seeks an end 
in which all other aims culminate. Here the practical per- 
sonal interest is supreme. Interest in the question of the 
existence of God does not arise so much from a desire to 
account for the universe in its wholeness as it springs out 
of the distresses and anxieties experienced by men in 
connection with actual or threatened loss, or failure, or 
suffering, or moral miscarriage. No disinterested view of 
God is possible. God is ultimately to every man the God 
of salvation. 


II. THERE IS A CLEAVAGE IN OUR LIFE 


A cleavage runs through the whole of human life. 
It is found in the depths of the soul of each individual. 
Men are never fully at one with themselves. Unity is an 
ideal rather than a fact. Each man’s soul is the arena of 
an unceasing conflict as the lower and the higher forces 
of his nature wage their constant strife. Intervals of peace 
when the lower forces are in subjection for a time are 
~\soon succeeded by a fresh division and alignment of 
forces and the conflict is renewed—no longer on the same 
plane but on a higher, it may be, and yet a conflict as 
bitter and desperate as those of any previous stage of his 
experience. In no other way, it seems, is progress achieved. 

This conflict within the soul of the man is reproduced 
on a larger scale in society. Not only because society is 
composed of individuals who are each the subject of 
inner strife but also because the individuals comprised 
in any given society stand on different moral levels. 
Two contrasted groups to which one stands related may 


6 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


represent two levels of experience within the same in- 
dividual, so that the battle waged within him turns out 
to be a battle between two groups of people with one of 
which he must at length align himself. Not only individ- | 
uals, therefore, but communities, as well, rise to a better 
life only through conflict. The conflict seems inevitable. 

The inner struggles of the man and of the group are 
reflected in their apprehension of the universe. In no 
age of the past have men been able to look upon the 
operation of the forces of nature without foreboding. 
It is quite idle to tell common men that there is no evil 
in the universe. So long as men shrink from death, so long 
will they see the universe divided between forces that 
make for good and forces that make for evil. In the end 
men always interpret the universe in the categories of 
worth and unworth that correspond to the character of 
their own inner life. The inability of men to read into 
the material system nothing but good is the outcome of a 
division in their impulses and purposes. The reconcilia- 
tion of the universe with itself waits upon the inner 
reconciliation of man with his own true self. 

The cleavage in our inner life is found at its greatest 
intensity in the moral realm. Our intellectual errors and 
difficulties often cause distraction and pain, but they are 
not very often accompanied by the deep sense of distress 
which we feel in the presence of our moral errors. Our 
emotional conflicts are often serious enough when we 
find ourselves tossed back and forth between the beauti- 
ful and the ugly, the pleasant and the painful. But 
neither in this case, again, is there the acute suffering 
that accompanies the sense of blameworthiness, since 
these other kinds of unhappiness are often traceable to 


THE QUESTION 7 


causes beyond our control. A conflict of mere emotions 
does not necessarily involve any degree of self-accusation. 
But the moral cleavage which we experience is a source 
of the deepest unhappiness because its source is traced 
to ourselves. When we consider the opposition between 
the better and the worse within us, the impressive fact 
is that, while we charge the worse to ourselves, the better 
is traced to a source beyond ourselves. In the language of 
religion, ‘‘The evil that is in me is my own, the good is 
from God.” It is “‘not I, but the grace of God that works 
in me,’”’ when I do some good thing. The story of our 
salvation is the story of the manner in which the one of 
these forces has displaced the other. 

1. A source of our suffering lies in our bondage to the 
past. It is not merely that at times the memory of past 
deeds oppresses our spirits but rather that we find our- 
selves in the toils of an unwelcome heritage. We have 
brought our past along with us and it is capitalized in 
our present state. Nor is it merely that we fear to break 
“with it, but that we are often impotent to do so. The 
nobler impulse is so often vetoed by it from within— 
“When I would do good, evil is present with me.” The 
evil seems to have preempted the land and we find our- 
selves worsted in the struggle to oust it. The great danger 
to us all is that we may succumb to the power of the 
dead hand, that we may abandon the effort to overcome 
our hereditary self and subside into moral inertness and 
the love of ease. Pity that we should ever be able to lose 
that holy discontent with ourselves without which no true 
betterment is possible! 

This moral bondage cannot be overthrown without help 
from beyond. The testimony of the ages is to this effect. 


8 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


The self-sufficient man is a vain boaster. His self-com- 
placency is an advertisement of his failure to discern the 
character of the better life to which we are all imper- 
iously summoned. Deliverance comes truly from a source 
beyond ourselves. Only when we discover that there is an 
inexhaustible reservoir of moral power not of ourselves 
but accessible to us, do we rise on stepping stones of our 
dead selves to higher things. It is this well-spring of 
moral energy beyond himself, of which he may partake, 
that makes a man capable of achieving the superhuman. 
In this way alone can the dead hand of the past be lifted 
from our souls. 

2. Our bondage is due in part to moral confusion or 
darkness. How it has come about that we do not always 
know the way we should take amid the issues of life we 
may not be able to explain but, to our experience, nothing 
is plainer. Even when we lift our hearts in supplication 
for light there is often present with us a benumbing sense 
that we know not what to pray for as we ought. 

This, too, is more than momentary or occasional. It is 
characteristic and typical and, in part at least, a conse- 
quence of our past. The experiences through which we 
have already gone are inadequate for our guidance in the 
days to come. This is true, not only of our individual 
experiences, but also of the accumulated thoughts of past 
generations into which we are introduced by birth and 
education. These leave us still in the dark when we at- 
tempt by their aid alone to solve our practical problems. 
How often our heritage from the past tends to bind us 
down to its laws or customs and to make us helpless 
before the new issues! To accept any of these in a docile 
manner is to fail at last. The memory of the past becomes 


THE QUESTION 9 


valuable only when it stimulates us to rise above itself 
to a better future. The moral maxims, like the common 
beliefs, of the past, need constant reinterpretation if 
they are not to mislead us. The noblest doctrines of life 
prove inadequate when they fail to stimulate us to rise 
to something higher still. New light must be gained con- 
stantly or we are lost. 

Moreover, every man’s problems are peculiarly his 
own. No solution which other men, or even the whole 
world of men, could offer can suffice for him. To be satis- 
fied with them is to prove false to himself. Hence, each of 
us often finds himself in an uncharted sea, and many 
seem to suffer shipwreck. We may not be able always to 
tell how the true guidance comes. Even if it be found in 
the spoken words of a friend or the written words of a 
book, nevertheless we put into those words a meaning 
which does not fully coincide with what was intended by 
him\who uttered them. It is an original element in the 
instruction that meets our peculiar need. We can never say, 
“The darkness is past and the true light now shineth,”’ 
until there comes to our souls a light that never shone 
so brightly in the heart of another. We must have im- 
mediate access to the fountains of light or at the last 
we fall into darkness. 

3. Again, the cleavage in our spirit appears as an antag- 
onism of our will toward the better part. Let us grant that 
this also comes to us by inheritance. But whatever may 
be the measure of truth in the doctrine of a hereditary 
moral character, it is impossible for any man who is 
awake to the conflict between the better and the worse 
within him to regard his inner opposition to the better 
life as purely as inheritance. He recognizes the activity 


10 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


of his own personal will in the matter. This will of his 
is no mere abstract quality or attribute of his nature, 
nor is it a mere impersonal force taking a direction of 
its own which may be more or less out of harmony with 
the highest aims of the human life, but it is very concrete 
and personal. Definite preferences and habits of life, 
cherished interests, social connections round which the 
affections twine, and persistent personal ambitions in 
process of realization become allied and embodied in 
some definite purpose and determination. These in their 
unity appear as a compact antagonism of spirit to the 
new aim to which the man finds himself called. And these 
are the man morally viewed. Under these conditions 
dangerous qualities of mind develop. The spirit of recal- 
citrancy to the call of the better life becomes personal 
antipathy, because that higher life to which we are called 
is never impersonal but stands before us in the character 
of some concrete individual. Thus personal enmity and 
bitterness often play an important part in the strife 
between the higher and the lower life. Dislike, ill-will, 
malice arise in the course of the moral struggle and deeds 
of personal violence are perpetrated. The story of human 
struggles for the better life shows that it surely takes at 
last the form of a personal conflict. Even if one may 
deny that it has been so in his own case and that all he 
has been aware of is the backward pull of a will, that he 
must call his own, vetoing the injunction to live the better 
life, he must acknowledge that the victory for the better 
life is never won until another will higher than his own 
becomes active in him. And so, in our best moments we 
picture to ourselves a great Friend constantly inviting us 
in spite of our scorn for his approaches to share the riches 


THE QUESTION 11 


of his heart, until at last by his persistency he has won 
us over to himself and brought us into the communion 
of his spirit. 

4. The ultimate relations of the struggle are personal. 
By the interpretation which Jesus Christ has put upon 
human life the moral law has become to all who share his 
mind the utterance of a personal Good Will. On the one 
hand, all the obligations and duties of life become the 
invitations of the Spirit of holiness and truth to share 
his character. On the other hand, all our attempts to 
fulfil these duties become expressions of our longing to 
become like him. Thus our violations of the law of recti- 
tude become to our minds offences against the Friend of 
friends. They become invasions of the rights of all per- 
sonalities because they are treason to the worth of the 
Highest Personality. Our sins make us debtors to men 
because they make us debtors to God. 

/The unhappiness which a highly sensitive soul feels 
under such conditions is unutterably great. Hymns, 
meditations and prayers poured out in abundance 
through all the Christian centuries reflect in striking 
figures the agonies of penitents who sought for some 
assurance that the wrongs of their lives had been righted. 
In order to relieve burdened consciences of their load 
churches have resorted to special seasons for the con- 
fession of sins and to many other means of peace. These 
continue in force in many places still, showing how per- 
sistent is this need and how distracted men have become 
under the pressure of it. Making all due allowance for 
the play of superstitions, fanaticism, and animal fear, 
‘we must admit that these things bear witness to an un- 
utterable need of our spirit. He who has no sympathy 


12 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


with the cry, “‘God be merciful to me, a sinner,’’ knows 
little of the depth of longing for the better life of which 
men are capable. 

4. Over against this darker side of human experience 
there is a brighter side, to which we must refer for a mo- 
ment in anticipation of later discussions. Among the 
most sacred and most intimate relations of life is the 
experience of deliverance from ill. This is, indeed, more 
significant even than the experience of conflict. Who is 
there that has never come to an injured friend with 
broken heart and trembling lip, to confess, ‘‘I have sinned 
against you,” and been forgiven? Or who has never heard 
from a friend this same confession and pronounced the 
words of absolution? There is a moral sensitiveness, to 
which a cruel word is as a sword-thrust, that stands forever 
on guard at the door-step of the soul’s privacy and dignity. 
And if once the spirit of a man finds itself seized of the 
conviction that it is confronted directly and continually 
by a Spirit of infinite worth to whom the activities of the 
human spirit are significant of a self-determined destiny, 
then this confession is its most fitting self-utterance. 

Summarily, then, on this point: 

5. Life for us never simply zs. It is either good or bad. 
It is bound to become either better or worse. So also, 
the world. Moreover life is never simply given to us. We 
make zt. Its value is found in the quality of the personality 
whose life it is. The marvel of our powers is appallingly 
great. It seems not too much to believe that the whole of 
past, present and future events might ultimately be 
comprehended in the unity of our personality and the 
meaning of the whole be disclosed when we discover our 
own ultimate personal destiny. Thus the days as they 


THE QUESTION 13 


come are hailed either with joy and satisfaction, or with 
regret and foreboding. The currents of life never run 
smooth for us and our hearts are always restless. Even 
the rustling of the dry leaves of autumn or the whispering 
of the tiny brook in the quiet woods may stir us to 
ecstasy or to uneasiness. For who knows what good or ill 
may lurk behind the most trivial events? As life lengthens 
the range of our interest widens, till we bear the burdens 
of many and ask for them as for ourselves, 

“Watchman, what of the night?’ Is the night passing 
and a better day about to dawn? 


III. THE ISSUE 
ee 


1. It is now evident, I trust, that the question, What 
must I do to be saved? presents an alternative as fearful 
as it is real: One said centuries ago, 

“Wide is the gate and broad is the way that 
leads to destruction and many are they who 
enter in thereby. How narrow is the gate and 
straightened the way that leads to life! And few 
are they that find it.” 

This is not the utterance of a frigid pessimism, but the 
passionate outburst of a breaking heart which had 
perceived the tragical outcome of many a human life. 
History recites it, and the newspapers of today daily 
continue the story. The fact constantly forces attention. 
Sin and crime, individual and national, are too abundant 
and too awful to be overlooked or to go unreckoned with. 
The law’s difficulty in keeping the mixed multitudes of 
our great cities in hand, the treacheries and hostilities 
that rend society into warring fragments, the desolation 


14 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


of fair lands and the murder of millions of victims to 
gratify the brutal lust for power are all too familiar and 
lie too heavily on our hearts today for us to tolerate an 
easy-going, optimistic view of life. And we are too fam- 
iliar with the tragedies that befell ancient culture to 
permit in us a spirit of unconcern in respect to the fate 
that may await our own. I do not see how any intelli- 
gent man who faces the moral facts can be content to say 
that all is going well with the great masses of humanity. 
Mankind is divided. The moment we turn from the con- 
templation of humanity in general to the concrete lives of 
the individual men and women whom we know, the fact 
of failure must be admitted by us all. 

At a later point in our study we shall consider the 
traditional doctrine of a final heaven and hell for men. 
At present we draw attention to it only because of its 
significance in relation to the matter now under discus- 
sion. The doctrine has had a firm grip on the imagination 
of many peoples representing different religions. And 
why? Not because it offers a final solution to the question 
of human destiny, but because it describes the moral 
cleavage in human life as widening out into a great gulf. 
Says Abraham to Dives in the parable of the rich man 
and Lazarus: 

“But between us and you there is a great gulf 
fixed, that they that would pass from hence to 
you may not be able, and that none may cross 
over from thence to us.”’ 
The fact that communication is represented as going on 
across the gulf, shows that the parable does not picture 
the separation as absolute. But it records the fact that 
many a man, after he has taken the wrong alternative, 


THE QUESTION 15 


finds the gulf between what he is and what he might 
have been too great to be crossed. Great is the tragedy 
of life! But let us believe also that it is not hopeless. 

2. The solution of our quéstion is not simple, though 
men often speak as if it were. We freely grant that some- 
times men can be encouraged and consoled with a simple 
answer to profound questions. This may be done when 
their difficulties narrow down to a single issue, either 
because the enquirer has fought his way so far through a 
perplexing situation that the crisis which he is facing 
has clarified itself to his mind until one question alone 
remains to be answered, or because only a single phase of 
the complex problem has come home to him. But as 
every great issue has many ramifications, so every ade- 
quate solution, no matter how simple its provisions may 
be, requires \prolonged and careful deliberation before 
its full meaning can be relatively clear. The way of sal- 
vation can appear simple only to one who finds himself 
face to face with a single issue that embraces all issues 
for him. But with every new day in his life and with 
every new generation in the life of a people new forms of 
the great issues present themselves and the solutions 
must be given an ever richer content of form. And so, 
unless “‘the old, old story’’ be ever told in a new way, by 
constant repetition it will become a “letter that kills”. 
and not a “spirit that makes alive.’’ How often creeds by 
constant recitation become idols that degrade the soul 
that bows down before them! 

The answer to a question may go far beyond the mean- 
ing of the question as it presents itself to the mind of 
the questioner. ‘‘What must I do to be saved?” cries out 
the Philippian jailer to Paul his prisoner. But the apost- 


16 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


olic answer read into the jailer’s question a far deeper 
meaning than was present to the mind of the frightened 
man: “Believe on the Lord Jesus and thou shalt be 
saved, thou and thy house.” Here appears an ideal per- 
sonality disclosed in a human life, a conscious trust in 
him, a new fellowship in life by the entrance into a 
personal relation to him—a new destiny. How profound, 
how far-reaching are the implications of the reply! How 
different from the old are the new life relations into 
which an acceptance of the reply would bring the man! 
The answer which the jailer sought would have turned 
out to be entirely inadequate to his needs. 

So must it always be. The very purpose of the Chris- 
tian message, as we shall see, is to awaken in the minds 
of men an interest in things hitherto beyond their grasp 
or their concern. It answers the questions which they 
ought to ask rather than the precise questions they do 
ask. 

Were we to trace the source of our human fears, begin- 
ning with the terrors excited by the mysterious, destruct- 
ive power of the material world around us, on through 
man’s fear of man till we reach the point where our great- 
est concern is to master this power of evil within our own 
bosom, it would become evident that the issue raised by 
the question, ‘What must I do to be saved?” is so pro- 
digious that it cannot be fully answered short of a phil- 
osophy that is world-embracing. The direction our dis- 
cussion must take is plain. It must begin with the story 
of deliverance as it is wrought out in the soul of the 
individual. Thence it must proceed to regard the life of 
the individual as a constituent factor in the life of the 
human community, because it is in the elevation of that 


THE QUESTION 17 


larger unity toward the good which is its final goal that 
his own salvation is achieved. Finally we must point out 
the manner in which this larger good carries with it a 
new interpretation of the universe, an interpretation 
that reveals a ministry to a good than which there can 
be none higher. Thus our subject deals with life in all 
its concreteness, linking the secret movements of men’s 
hearts with all their public affairs and their outer environ- | 
ments. Our study seeks an answer to the call of their 
need in all the ranges of their life. 


CHAPTER II 
AN EARLY CHRISTIAN ANSWER 


The very term Christian, an adjectival form of the 
word Christ, anointed, which is a Greek translation of the 
Hebrew Messiah, reminds us that our religious faith has 
come to us from the Hebrews through the Greeks. We 
cannot understand our traditional Christian faith with- 
out some knowledge of the manner in which our own 
spiritual life has been moulded by the influence of these 
peoples. And it may be that we have derived from both 
the Hebrews and the Greeks certain ideas of salvation 
that do not belong intrinsically to the Christian faith 
and that must give way to ideas more natural to the 
men of today and more worthful. 

The first Christians came from the bosom of the Jewish 
community and were heirs to its traditions—its oral and 
written narratives, its religious and ethical spirit, its 
social and political ideals, and its views of the world. 
It was natural that the new religious life that came to the 
birth in the hearts of the first Christians should be inter- 
preted by them according to the ways of thinking preva- 
lent among the Jewish people. It is quite plain that many 
of the early Christians regarded themselves as the true 
Jews. It was natural, then, that they should hope at 
first to win the entire Jewish community to their faith 
and that when their expulsion from the Jewish religious 
order showed the impossibility of realizing this hope, 
they should regard the unbelieving Jews as traitors to 
the faith of their fathers. 


18 


AN EARLY CHRISTIAN ANSWER 19 


First of all, the early Christians were heirs to the 
temper of mind that had been fostered in the Jew through 
the century-long, bitter struggle of the Hebrew-Israelit- 
ish-Jewish people to maintain their separate existence 
and national spirit against the fearful military onslaughts 
and the constant economic and racial pressure of mighty 
neighboring peoples, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the 
Babylonians, the Persians and the Greeks. Their earlier 
history became to them the story of the manner in which 
their God had shown his superiority to all other gods and 
prepared them for a destiny greater and higher than eye 
had yet seen or heart conceived. But at the very moment 
that Jesus of Nazareth was born the heel of the haughty 
Roman was resting on the neck of the Jews and con- 
stituted a defiance to their faith. The early Christian 
writings reflect in many places the proud determina- 
tion of the Jew to triumph at last in the name of his God. 
In Luke’s beautiful story of the mothers of John the 
Baptist and Jesus two hymns are quoted expressing the 
singers’ faith in the purpose and power of their God to 
“Scatter the proud in the imagination of their heart, to 
put down princes from their thrones, and exalt them of 
low degree.’’ They should then be ‘‘delivered out of the 
hand of their enemies and serve him without fear.’ 
These Jewish sentiments lingered long in the Christian 
mind. 

Thus the Christian salvation was commonly set forth 
in the forms of the Jewish hope. The kingdoms of the 
world were under the power of Satan, the enemy of God 
and of his people. These were to be overthrown and in 
their place was to come the Kingdom of God foreseen by 
the ancient prophets. The world should come to a cata- 


20 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


clysmic end, eternal destruction should suddenly come 
upon its evil powers and the reign of God should as sud- 
denly be set up. In this connection there rises the figure 
of a great Deliverer, the Anointed of God, descending, it 
may be, from the heavens to establish the new order. 
Early Christians found the glowing utterances of the 
ancient prophets and the daring apocalypses of the Jew- 
ish seers of a later date suitable modes for the expression 
of their own confidence that salvation was very near at 
hand. Sometimes these utterances are ascribed directly 
to Jesus. At other times they are ascribed to his angels 
from heaven. Our book of Revelation embraces a collec- 
tion and revision of these Jewish and Christian apoc- 
alypses. Most vivid of all is the picture of the coming 
downfall of Rome: ‘“‘Woe, woe, the great city!” “In her 
was found the blood of prophets and saints and of all 
that have been slain upon the earth.” 

But this language, so natural to people enduring cruel 
persecutions, might seem quite unfitting when the times 
had changed and the growth of Christians in numbers 
and power gave them a helpful relation to the life and 
enterprises of the peoples of the world. We may well ask, 
then, how far their Jewish inheritance was promotive of 
the true purposes of the Christian faith. 

In the next place, there was the Jewish ritual—the 
sanctuary, the priesthood, the sacrifices, the prayers and 
confessions, and the songs. These outward forms were 
viewed by Christians as more or less suitable to the new 
faith, which at the same time put a deeper meaning into 
them. Beside these forms there were also religious and 
moral instructions of the Jewish prophets and teachers . 
that passed over into the Christian body and made it 


AN EARLY CHRISTIAN ANSWER 21 


profoundly conscious of a moral superiority and of a 
mission to other peoples. Naturally, the Christian mis- 
sionary often followed the footsteps of the Jewish mis- 
sionaries who had made many converts to their faith 
from among the Gentiles. 

And, finally, the early Christians were inheritors of the 
mental picture of the world that was prevalent in those 
days among many peoples. Whatever may have been the 
cosmic philosophy of the great philosophers of old, the 
common people looked upon the world of nature around 
them as inhabited by spirits that were friendly or un- 
friendly to men and that manifested their will toward 
mankind and their power by coming upon men to afflict 
or to heal. One’s enemies were not merely the men who 
sought to do him harm, but the evil demons that took 
possession of the forces of nature, or even of the bodies of 
men, and wrought out their evil purposes through human 
sufferings and woe. Death itself was the work of the 
powers of evil. At the same time, the friends who could 
come to one’s succor were not merely human friends but 
also the invisible angels of mercy who contended against 
the evil demons and sought to save mankind from them. 
Thus the whole of the conflict between good and evil 
presented to men of old the spectacle of two great armies 
arrayed against each other in the heavens, on the earth 
and under the earth. The destiny of men depended on 
the side which should win the victory. One who would be 
Savior of mankind must prove his power to range the 
good beings on his side and to overthrow the hosts of 
wickedness in places high and low. It is quite in keeping 
-with all this that the narratives of the deeds of Jesus 
should accentuate his power to cast out and overthrow 


22 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


all the powers of evil and to summon the angels of mercy 
to action in men’s behalf. But it brings up a very serious 
question: How far was the true Christian message ob- 
scured by these forms of thought and speech? We shall — 
now consider the early Christian interpretation more in 
detail. 


I. THE MARKAN INTERPRETATION 


1. The Gospel of Mark is a dramatic representation of 
the personal career of Jesus of Nazareth. Heralded long 
before by the prophets and announced as imminent by 
John the Baptiser, he suddenly emerges into public 
view. His greatness is declared by the marvels that as- 
semble about his baptism—the sky is cleft, a dove 
descends, a voice announces his divine sonship. Victor- 
ious in a conflict with Satan in the wilderness, his first 
public message declares the kingdom of God immediately 
impending. He is to introduce it. As the events of his 
career unfold, the references to himself grow in frequency 
and emphasis. His messianic mission, at first stated 
privately to his immediate followers, is reiterated to the 
very end, even in his answer to the Sanhedrin that he 
knew would cost him his life. Quite in keeping is the 
series of visions, given to his disciples, of the approaching 
ruin of the Jewish political, social and religious order, of 
international wars and a final catastrophe. 

Mingled with these are other utterances that seem 
hardly consistent with the common messianic hope. In 
parables are pictured the unreceptive popular mind, 
the comparative fruitlessness of his message, the slow 
coming of the kingdom, and his imminent separation 


AN EARLY CHRISTIAN ANSWER 23 


from them by death. The declaration of the disciples’ 
faith in his messiahship is followed by an injunction to 
observe silence on the point till he should rise from the 
dead. He demands of one would-be disciple the total 
renunciation of natural goods in order to win life eternal. 
Most of all do we see the contrast when he sits at his 
last supper with the twelve and tells them that the bread 
and wine are his blood. There is no messianism of the old 
order in these words. The personal relation prevails. 
Not messianic conquest, but vicarious life-giving is to be 
the genius of the new order. These sayings betoken a 
spiritual revolution in the minds of his followers. They 
are the voice of the later Christian community justifying 
its faith in the Messiahship of a Sufferer. 

2. Mark’s Gospel registers the early Christian con- 
sciousness of a summons to a new and ambitious career. 
The aims of Jesus are seen to be revolutionary—no 
putting of new wine into old bottles, no stitching of new 
patches on old clothes, no subjection to external forms 
(Sabbath was made for man, not man for Sabbath), no 
more reliance upon ceremony (not the unwashed hands 
but the unwashed heart is the serious thing); no mere 
moralism but personal allegiance, not subservience to 
authority but the power of achievement, not the keeping 
of outer commands but the exercise of love. Thus we see 
that the followers of the Nazarene knew they had the 
power to win men to a new career like their own. The 
people whose life is reflected in Mark saw in Jesus the 
Mighty One of God, and believed that they shared in 
his power. Emphasis is laid on Jesus’ acts of healing. 
‘The demons, those evil beings that took possession of 
men in order to destroy them, shrank from contact with 


24 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


him and fled at his bidding, for they recognized in him 
their master. To cast out a demon was to make conquest 
of Satan, the prince of demons. Such physical healings 
were also moral conquests, the mastery of sin and evil. 
If this new power could become the permanent possession 
of men, all the woe of pain, sickness and even death might 
be expelled, and the long hoped-for reign of peace and 
happiness be ushered in at last. To heal the sick, op- 
pressed as they were by the devil, was the same thing 
as to forgive sins. Reflecting back upon those early days 
the later experience of possessing a holy spirit, Mark’s 
Gospel ascribes directly to Jesus the warning that he who 
blasphemes against the Spirit has never forgiveness. 
When it names as the first of the signs promised to believ- 
ers after his ascension, ‘‘In my name they shall cast out 
demons,’’ it declares that his mysterious power had be- 
come a permanent endowment of his disciples. 
According to the Markan interpretation, therefore, 
Jesus’ message of forgiveness had more than a ‘“‘moral”’ 
or “religious”’ significance. It embraced as well the curing 
of physical, economic and social ills. We need not wonder 
that the people who saw him riding into Jerusalem should 
hail him as son of David, that the ecclesiastical leaders 
should be scandalized by his healings on the Sabbath and 
by his defiance of conventional morality in eating with 
the hated tax-gatherers and despised religious outcasts, 
or that his invasion of the temple area to purge it of its 
traffickers should precipitate action aiming at his death. 
3. The Markan narrative culminates in the description 
of the final issue of the struggle with the established 
authorities. The entire story of Jesus’ career is dominated 
by the thought of the meaning of that struggle. Jesus 


AN EARLY CHRISTIAN ANSWER 25 


appears as no ascetic, no recluse, though at times he 
sought retirement for thought and prayer, as other 
serious men often do. He threw himself into the whole 
life of men and sought the betterment of their state, 
physical and spiritual, temporal and eternal. While 
warning men against the hankering after riches and 
counselling certain ones to renounce their wealth, he 
rejected the idea that helping the poor was the chief 
matter. Mark’s gospel is not an economic gospel in its 
central aim. While the economic wrong was the occasion 
of his interference when he expelled licensed extortioners 
from the temple grounds, the real ground of his inter- 
ference was something deeper, namely, apostasy from 
the Father. Religious despots are the most dangerous 
and the most desperate. Such men are willing to lose 
both wealth and honor, if need be, so long as they retain 
the power to reduce the spirits of other men to slavery 
and make themselves their gods. Because Jesus saw this 
despotism standing right athwart the path of redemption 
for the people he fought it. He knew that the price to be 
paid for such a conquest would be his own life and he was 
willing to pay this high price for the ransom of the many. 
He made a direct frontal attack in the knowledge that the 
overthrow of the ecclesiastical system would open the 
way for the kingdom. His sufferings would thus have a 
universal significance. They would be vicarious and his 
disciples must drink the same cup as he, the ransom price 
to be paid by them for the life of the world. 

How fittingly, therefore, he is represented as picturing 
to the vision of his wondering disciples his own enthus- 
ilastic anticipation of the future course of humanity, the 
judgment of all iniquity and the culmination of his pur- 


26 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


pose in his glorious return to power over all the nations. 
Of this they were to be ever confident and expectant— 
“Watch.” It is entirely in keeping with all this that he is 
represented as standing, not many hours later in the chill 
of the night, alone before his judges and responding to 
their fatal question with a holy rapture when he assured 
them that from that day they too must expect to see him 
sitting in the place of supreme authority and coming 
to his kingdom in the mystery and majesty of those 
intangible forces whose symbol is the clouds of heaven. 

4. We find, then, in the Markan rendering of the Chris- 
tian faith a representation of a profound movement that 
was in progress within the community that afterwards 
grew up around the name of Jesus and counted itself the 
organ of his message. Two outstanding convictions char- 
acterize this movement. The first was the conviction 
that the God of the heavens above had come to them 
with the assurance that the good things for which their 
fathers had longed, but had died without seeing, were 
about to be realized. The Messiah who had gone into the 
heaven would shortly come again to overthrow all evil 
and establish the everlasting rule of purity and peace. 
Their gospel was emphatically a gospel of power. Im- 
measurable possibilities of achievement lay in their faith. 
There was also the danger that a moody despair might 
ensue, should these vivid expectations be disappointed, 
or the equal danger of outbursts of fanaticism in the 
effort to force an external fulfilment of their hopes. How 
could a naive faith like theirs long survive in a world 
pervaded by natural law as we now know ours to be? 
This question will claim our attention later. 


AN EARLY CHRISTIAN: ANSWER 27 


The second of these outstanding convictions is that the 
personality of Jesus was the basis of the fulfilment of 
their hopes. So long as the impression made by his career 
could be kept fresh and strong in their minds—and the 
written gospel sought to keep it so—their new faith could 
be preserved and guarded from lapsing into a dead 
ecclesiasticism or a slavish adherence to some scheme of 
social and economic reform. 


Il. THE LUKAN INTERPRETATION 


Luke’s picture of the career of Jesus is drawn in a 
greater variety of colors and has a wider background than 
Mark’s. His story is the most beautiful and entrancing 
that ever came from human pen. If at points the vivid- 
ness that seems to spring from personal recollections in 
Mark is missing, the loss is more than made up by new 
scenes in the great drama, added sayings, their expansion 
into somewhat regular discourse, and many new applica- 
tions arising from the experiences of a larger community. 
The ‘‘Christian consciousness” is becoming more explicit. 
It comes to light in the manner in which the sayings of 
Jesus furnish the guidance, strength and courage his 
disciples needed in the battles of life, in the mutual exhort- 
ations or open debates of the public assemblies, in their 
pushing on as with push of pike to the conquest of the 
world, or in the vindication of their gospel at the cost of 
their own lives. In Luke we can further decipher the 
experiences of the saved community. To specify somewhat: 

1. The character and purpose of the ““kingdom”’ are 
now more clearly discerned. The idea of an economic 
program or a class struggle is distinctly repudiated as a 


28 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


temptation of the devil. The kingdom was not to be a 
‘‘bread”’ kingdom. How keen so ever might be the pangs 
of the hungry, and how just so ever their claims, their true 
needs are deeper—‘‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but 
by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.” 
This high position assumed by Jesus at the beginning is 
never departed from. No bread king was he, but the ‘‘bless- 
ed” hungry ones whom he promised to fill were the heart- 
hungry who would hear the word of God and keep it. The 
covetous temper in rich or poor is denounced. Men ought 
to be “rich toward God.” The fate of the rich man who 
allowed an invalid to starve to death at his door exhibits 
the vanity of mere wealth. All love of wealth must be re- 
nounced, but there is to be no discrimination against the 
rich—Jesus hesitates not to dine with a wealthy tax- 
gatherer! and commends his resolution to practice justice 
and benevolence. The Lukan narrative reflects the strug- 
gle among the Christians over the question of an econom- 
ic Gospel and the victory for the higher interpretation. 

The inherited Jewish desire for political power is also 
rejected. Jesus did not envy the Romans the possession 
of all the kingdoms of the world. To covet it would be 
to worship Satan?. He does not fear Herod, that ‘‘jackal”’ 
of a king who had power to kill because he was a hireling. 
The stern demand that everything be renounced‘ for the 
sake of the kingdom, the command to pity and love 
and heal men and to forgive them without limit, and 
Jesus’ own tears over Jerusalem‘ attest the presence in the 
Christian heart of those days of such an appreciation of 
spiritual things as makes ambition for material power, 
by comparison, devilish. 


1Lu. 19:1 ff STiu. 13:32 5Lu. 6:27 
2Lu. 4:5, 8 “Lu. 9:23 ff Tu. 19:41 ff 


AN EARLY CHRISTIAN ANSWER 29 


The danger of falling into a blind fanaticism—so 
common a by-product in religions—is met fairly. Jesus 
would not make trial of God by a challenge to nature!, 
that was based on the empty expectation of a miraculous 
interference with its ways. His was not a kingdom of 
physical marvels. The generation of sight-seekers is evil?. 
The when or where of the kingdom were not the matter 
of chief importance, but its inwardness’. The chastening 
experiences of disappointment and persecution were 
teaching the early community that the miraculous coming 
of the kingdom was not to be immediate. The story of 
Jesus’ undiscriminating ministry to the needy shows that 
the Gospel of Luke emanated from a circle of believers 
who looked for a salvation that consisted ultimately not 
in a social, economic or political order established by 
external power, but in the pure goodness of disinterested 
love. 

2. There is a vivid consciousness of the inward presence 
of the divine Spirit. This is, perhaps, the most significant 
feature of the inner life of the new community—the 
assurance that all its members were possessed of the 
source of the grace and power and insight that dwelt in 
Jesus and in the ancient Hebrew prophets. It was the 
Spirit of the only God, distinctive, separate, “‘holy.’’ 
With Luke this is a very sacred subject. It permeates 
thoroughly his Gospel and the Acts. All that Jesus Christ 
has done for men is comprised in this supreme gift. It 
made every believer an organ of the will of Christ, of 
God. Possibly the influence of Paul partly accounts for 
Luke’s emphasis, but his conception is less mature than 
Paul’s and represents a less developed religious con- 
sciousness. With Luke external miraculous displays 


4Lu. 4:9-12 2Lu. 11:29 ff 3Lu. 17:20 21 


30 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


receive much emphasis, while with Paul it is the moral 
character. It seems likely that Paul was himself indebted 
to the primitive community for the conviction that this 
was the secret source of the new power of the Christians. 
This claim to possess the spirit no doubt often eventuated 
in outbreaks of fanaticism, and the felt necessity of 
restraining their excesses led in course of time to attempts 
to restrict the operation of the gift to regular official 
orders. But the significant thing we wish to point out 
is the evidence we see here that the kingdom of God was 
now being conceived in terms of inward life rather than 
the terms of a world cataclysm—though the latter never 
disappeared. In keeping with this, Luke’s Gospel breathes 
a spirit of hope for all men. We are to despair of no man, 
for the longing for the better life may be found in the 
breasts of the seemingly worthless, the moral and religious 
outcasts. The self-satisfied are the unworthy. Accord- 
ingly, the coming of the Christ is announced first to the 
socially obscure who were rich in faith. The everlasting 
song of peace and good will is sung by angels into the 
ears of astonished shepherds. This conviction that they 
had received from Jesus himself the same holy Spirit 
that gave to his personality its distinctive character, is 
perhaps the most striking characteristic of these groups 
of Christians. It is the product of the elevation of soul 
into which they had come through the knowledge of 
Jesus’ life of pure love, the tragical rejection of him by 
their fellow-Jews, his awful death and his entrance into 
the heavenly life eternal. Instead of the desolate sense of 
separation from God and the burden of guilt there has 
come to them the certainty of access to him and his in- 
ward sustenance of their spirits. The deepest currents of 


AN EARLY CHRISTIAN. ANSWER 31 


their life are felt to be from God himself. An astounding 
richness of inner experience and the spontaneous impulse 
to utter it and impart it to others embolden them to 
say that they too are inspired as even the ancient proph- 
ets were. The right to speak their convictions has become 
sacred. They have a commission from Jesus, the Christ, 
to speak to all the world the things that they had seen 
and heard. In all this they were partakers of the gift of 
Christ and were qualified to do the same things as he had 
done, even to the point of laying down their lives. Heal- 
ings, exorcisms, raising the dead, and an absolute suprem- 
acy over the Evil One were theirs. In the life of this new 
community, in contrast to the life around them, there 
stands out, like a great rock rising grandly out of the 
stormy sea, the consciousness of that inner unity with 
God which was Jesus’ gift. Thus the Lukan interpreta- 
tion of the Christian salvation prepared the way for the 
propagation of that Christian mysticism which can be 
traced down through Paul, John, the mystics of the 
Catholic church, the Calvinist confessors of the ‘‘secret 
testimony of the Spirit,”’ and the great revivals of mod- 
ern Protestantism to our own day. 


III. THE MATTHAEAN INTERPRETATION 


The Gospel of Matthew lacks somewhat of the spon- 
taneity and freshness so characteristic of Mark and Luke. 
It corresponds with a stage in the life of an early Chris- 
tian community when they felt the necessity of renounc- 
ing definitely every thought of union with the Jewish 
community. For the new community had to preserve 
its own true character and at the same time stand firm 


32 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


against the world. Two features stand out distinctly in 
Matthew. The first of these is the frequent recurrence of 
the saying, ‘‘That it might be fulfilled,’ and the other is 
the emphasis on the fall of Jerusalem. The former regis- 
ters the conviction that the new faith rises out of the old 
and at the same time feels itself to have transcended the 
old. The second points to a divine sentence executed 
upon a people that had rejected the Messiah and for- 
feited their place in the kingdom which he had offered 
them. The Christians were truly the heirs of those prom- 
ises which the Jews had forfeited by disobedience. Their 
life was of a higher order than the old, for the revelation 
that Jesus had given to them was of a purer and holier 
kind and by its very superiority pronounced against 
the permanency of the former. The striking contrast 
between them is set forth in the oft-repeated saying of 
Jesus, “It was said to them of old time—but I say unto 
you.” Here is, at least, an implicit criticism of the Jewish 
Scriptures in the interest of a higher salvation than the 
Jew had found. To specify: 

1. The new community claimed to be the truly elect 
people of God. The kingdom of the heavens, foretold by 
the prophets to the time of John the Baptist and preached 
since then by Jesus, was theirs. They are the community 
of God, the depositaries of its priceless treasures, the 
heralds of its coming in its glory, the people to whom its 
hidden meaning is made known. They alone are com- 
missioned to speak it to the nations of the world, for to 
them alone of all men the Son of God, who possesses the 
secret of the Father, has made it known. Kings and gov- 
ernors are to listen to them and when the hour of testing 
comes they will not fail of the words they need, for the 


AN EARLY CHRISTIAN ANSWER 33 


spirit of their Father will speak in them. Their light is 
unquenchable, for ‘‘a city set on a hill cannot be hid.” 
We see in them a community saved from the fear of men 
and from dependence on those things on which men com- 
monly build their hopes. 

The pure spirituality of the kingdom in its present 
state and the inwardness of its wealth are placed in the 
forefront. Instead of Luke’s ‘‘Blessed are ye poor,”’ which 
if left standing alone is open to an economic interpreta- 
tion, Matthew’s version of the sermon on the mount has 
for its opening words', ‘‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, 
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” It is those who 
mourn, the meek, those who hunger after righteousness, 
the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers and the 
persecuted for righteousness sake who also have their 
portion in that glorious future. Hence these people 
practice a strictness of life outwardly and inwardly that 
altogether surpasses the demands of the Jewish law and 
they manifest a goodness toward men, even enemies, that 
is like that of the Father in the heavens, who maketh 
his sun rise on the evil and on the good alike. Their piety 
is of the unostentatious kind, known and rewarded by 
God alone. They think of Him as their Father and are 
rich in the assurance that He will care for them. They 
dismiss therefore that warping anxiety that distresses 
the nations of the world and they concern themselves 
only with the kingdom. They cultivate lives of trustful 
prayer and brotherly love and good will. They are war- 
ranted in doing this because the Master? also, to whom 
alone the secret of the Father was given, was himself 
meek and lowly in heart. He bade all the weary and heavy 
laden place themselves under his yoke and find for their 





Mt. 5:3 2Mt. 11:27-30 


34 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


souls the rest that he knew so well. So far do these believ- 
ers attempt to carry this principle of self-renunciation! 
that they consider themselves bound not to make ordin- 
ary provision for the clothing and food that will be needed 
in their propagation of the kingdom. At times? they seem 
to have held to the value of an ascetical view of marriage 
for those whose interest in the kingdom require such a 
renunciation. They will not even undertake to defend 
their lives from the violence of their foes for they have 
learned from the Master that ‘‘all that take the sword 
shall perish with the sword.” 

It is evident that this Gospel emanates from no Gentile 
Christian community. These believers hold fast to the 
Jewish prerogative, but the significant thing is that, in 
their view, it has passed away from the Jewish theocracy, 
with the hierarchy at its head, to them, the true children 
of Abraham. Hence they emphasize and enlarge upon 
the Master’s words of condemnation’ against the Jewish 
cities for rejecting his words and they see in the words of 
the prophets of old who condemned the contemporary 
Israelites for blindness of heart a description of their own 
contemporary fellow-Jews. Consequently, the destruction 
of Jerusalem‘ is made to emphasize the fearful conse- 
quences of unbelief and apostasy. Consequently also, the 
controversies between Jesus and the Jewish leaders 
stand out prominently, and a terrible table of woes is 
given in the Master’s own words. On the other hand there 
stands out the imperativeness that Christians recognize 
their own high prerogative, maintain an exalted purity, 
practice brotherly forgiveness without limit, and exercise 
as the congregation of the ‘‘called”’ that authority, con- 
ferred on them by Jesus, to judge one another and the 


1Mt. 10:9f @Mt. 19:3-12 SMt. 11:20 ff 
4Mt, 21, 22, 23 


AN EARLY CHRISTIAN ANSWER 35 


world also. Indeed so high is their dignity! that the final 
judgment that is to separate the nations of the world 
into two divisions and either consign them, on the one 
hand, to the fire prepared for the devil and his angels, or, 
on the other hand, to the kingdom prepared for them 
from the foundation of the world, is held to proceed on 
the basis of their attitude toward these ‘‘brethren”’ of the 
King who for his sake were so often hungry, or thirsty, 
or homeless strangers, or naked, or sick, or in prison. At 
this point there breaks out a deep mystical idea, namely, 
that he is the Invisible Presence that secures efficacy to 
their prayers and is to be with them all the days of their 
lives even to the end. ‘‘For where two or three are gath- 
ered together in my name there am I in the midst of 
them.” This thought, however, is undeveloped, for it 
does not readily cohere with the belief that he was to 
come from the heavens at some future time. 

2. The Kingship of Jesus is the theme that dominates 
the Matthaean interpretation. From the outset he is the 
one who should ‘“‘save his people from their sins.”’ But 
there is no distinct explanation of the means by which 
that salvation should come to them. There is, to be sure, 
the striking utterance, ‘‘The Son of Man came not to be 
ministered unto, but to minister and to give his life a 
ransom for many,” but the use of the figure of a ransom 
here does not ground a doctrine of atonement (in the 
ordinary sense) but only carries to the climax the ideal 
that he has already impressed on them many times, 
namely, that the life that is hoarded for its owner is lost 
and the life that is given for others is saved. If, therefore, 
they were to have the high places in his kingdom they 
must drink his cup, so soon to be drained, and minister 
1Mt, 25:31-46 


36 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


with his ministry. Unto this, at least, they were being 
saved. Their outstanding representation of this salvation 
is the apocalyptical. 

The royal dignity of Jesus comes to the front. His | 
genealogy by regularly ordered periods of succession is 
traced through the Davidic line to Abraham. He came 
at the appointed time. A new star in the heavens an- 
nounced his birth. It is at Jerusalem, the seat of govern- 
ment, that the news of the advent causes excitement. 
Like Moses, he promulgates from a mountain the laws 
of the kingdom and pronounces weal or woe upon men 
according as they keep or keep not these edicts of his. 
The perspective through which this Gospel sees him per- 
mits this exalted representation of the homely and tender 
messages of Jesus. The laws of earthly princes are re- 
versed by his revolutionary teaching and their glories 
are as nothing compared to the honors that await those 
who renounce all worldly goods for his sake. His twelve 
missionaries shall be twelve kings sitting in judgment on 
their twelve tribes. In the field of achievement “‘nothing 
shall be impossible’ to them. 

We notice, too, that the limitation which Mark allows 
to Jesus’ knowledge as to the day of judgment disappears 
in Matthew, and instead of the reply to the rich young 
ruler, ‘‘Why callest thou me good?” as Mark has it, we 
read, ‘“‘Why askest thou me concerning that which is 
good?”’ and instead of ‘“‘There is none good but one, that 
is, God,” we read, ‘‘One there is who is good.” The change 
is indicative of the growing sense that the salvation of the 
believer reposes on the personality of the Messiah. In 
the end the Son of Man shall come in his own glory and 
shall judge all the nations for their attitude toward his 
brethren. 


AN EARLY CHRISTIAN ANSWER 37 


The death of Jesus is presented as having a cosmic 
effect, being accompanied by a terrible earthquake and 
by the rising of many of the deceased saints bodily from 
their graves and ascension into the “holy city,’’ presum- 
ably heaven. At his resurrection there is again an earth- 
quake and a visitation of terrible angels. Finally, before 
he leaves his disciples his instructions are introduced by 
the announcement, ‘‘All authority hath been given into 
me in heaven and on earth.’”’ The King makes the king- 
dom. The salvation which the Christian community 
awaits takes its character from the personality of the 
Savior. 

3. Comment. As one tries to visualize mentally the 
course of the inner life of the people whose controlling 
impulses and life purposes are set forth in the language 
of this Gospel it is impossible not to feel a vast sense of 
exaltation at the thought that they foresaw, as with 
prophetic vision, that the course of the coming ages, with 
the inevitable heritage of good or evil, would be deter- 
mined by the attitude of men toward those profound 
convictions which held dominion in their souls, and that 
they were right. It is difficult to conceive a state of mind 
in which a richer evaluation of the homely graces that 
grow out of the life of love, a more assured supremacy 
over material conditions, greater sternness of moral 
decision, deeper devotion to one supreme personality so 
worthy of their love, and a higher certainty of ultimate 
and absolute triumph over every ill are united in a single 
soul. This is the salvation that came to those people 
whose hearts are laid bare in Matthew’s Gospel, whatever 
may be the value of their theory of the manner in which 
it would finally come to them, and whatever the defects 


38 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


which appear in their tendency to asceticism, fanaticism 
and a censorious judgment of those opposed to them. 


IV. AN ESTIMATE OF THE EARLY CHRISTIAN ANSWER 


The manner and the means by which the Christian 
salvation, as portrayed in the three Gospels, was at 
length to come, are emphasized with fiery zeal in Jude 
and Second Peter, and unfolded with graphic power in 
the Apocalypse of John. These pictures of world-catas- 
trophes reflect the effect on the Christian mind of the 
terrible struggles of the Jewish people to preserve their 
national and religious identity amid the overturnings of 
empires, the bitterness of the internal strife that had 
marked their religious progress, their anticipations of 
sudden interpositions of their God on their behalf in the 
future and their acceptance of the common.interpreta- 
tion of the unusual and the spectacular as specially 
significant of the divine presence or power. 

Cataclysms in nature or in human life marked for 
them the lighting down of the mighty arm of their God 
in vindication of his people. The early Christians were 
nurtured in this atmosphere. Regarding themselves as 
the true heirs of the Jewish faith and hope, they naturally 
expected a similar deliverance in their day of trouble. 
They had not long to wait. The measure of political 
power which still remained to the dependent Jewish 
state was soon called into action against the new “sect” 
by the hierarchy. They were driven from temple and 
synagogue. When the Jewish rebellion came, culminating 
in the capture and ruin of Jerusalem, the burning of the 
temple, and the extinction of the last vestige of their 


AN EARLY CHRISTIAN ANSWER 39 


political power, it was but natural that Jewish Christians 
should interpret the tragedy as a final divine retribution 
visited upon a people who had rejected God’s Messiah 
and maltreated his followers. What could be more natural 
than that amid such scenes they should recall those words 
of the Master that seemed to them prophetic of these 
very events and that his sayings should receive such 
amplification and application as their needs demanded 
at the time? 

When necessity led the Christians to follow into foreign 
lands the roads which the Jewish Dispersion had taken 
at an earlier time, when their new faith came into contact 
with Graeco-Roman life on all its sides and a free and 
outspoken declaration of their faith brought upon them 
the suspicions of a Nero or a Domitian on the throne of 
the Empire, it was natural that their sufferings under the 
hand of mighty Rome should arouse to activity new 
prophets who proclaimed the doom pronounced by the 
Lord Jesus from his throne in the heavens. Rome, too, 
must fall and, by comparison, the fall of Jerusalem would 
be as nothing. Then appeared the Apocalypse of John 
with its symbolic representations of the terrors exper- 
ienced by the Christians of those days and their anticipa- 
tions of a speedy and final deliverance. The empire of | 
Rome was the world to them. The destruction of the 
great city that ruled the nations of the earth must surely 
usher in the end of human affairs. Let his people note 
the signs! The day when God would pronounce his final 
judgment on all wickedness was at hand. 

The Christian apocalypses reflect the character of the 
nervous strain they endured through popular contempt, 
mob violence, formal arrest, trial, torture, and martyr- 


40 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


dom. To these was added the discouragement that came 
through the futile waiting for the end. There was also 
the rending of private affections by the break-up of fam- 
ilies through religious division, the timidity or growing 
coldness of some, and the fanatical impatience of others. 
At such a time it was natural that there should be a 
revival of the spirit of Jewish apocalypticism. The lan- 
guage of the Jewish apocalypticists became their language. 
Old apocalypses were rewritten, given a new setting and 
had many new visions added to them. Appeal was made 
to the anticipative power of the imagination rather than 
to cold logic or sober fact. Apocalypse is the dramatiza- 
tion of faith. All the new apocalypses disclose the internal 
difficulties of these early Christians. The very hope that 
Jesus would return exposed them to the snares of im- 
posters and to the despair that comes from disillusion- 
ment. Yet, breaking through all the fetters that bound 
their faith, there shines out clear and strong the assur- 
ance that they would be victors in the end. The elect 
might be only a little flock but they were to receive from 
the Father the promised kingdom. Let not the time seem 
long, for with God a thousand years are as one day. As 
the times of the Jews had been fulfilled, so also should 
the times of the Gentiles. God would avenge his elect 
who cried to him night and day. By this form of faith 
they were enabled to live through those fearful days. 
Throughout these Christian-Jewish apocalypses the 
personality of Jesus is the central figure. This fact attests 
the marvellous hold He had upon the hearts of His fol- 
lowers but it also signalizes the early influence of a pessi- 
mistic estimate of humanity and of the world inherited 
from the Jews. The recrudescence of this view of things 


AN EARLY CHRISTIAN ANSWER 41 


in successive periods of Christian history always marks a 
reaction from the high level of the true Christian hope 
back to the lower level of a Jewish hope that ought to 
have been outlived long since. But at the same time we 
must say that by disrobing the Christian hope of these 
repulsive Jewish forms we discover back of them the 
unconquerable confidence of the early Christian that the 
Nazarene was one day to be the dominant power in the 
life of humanity, lifting it to the level of the divine. The 
story even of the material world itself would become the 
story of a human conquest of its wonders and its secret 
powers. 


CHAPTER III 
THE CHRISTIAN JEW TO THE GREEK 


Stress of circumstances and the zeal characteristic of 
a new faith united to drive the spokesmen of the Chris- 
tian Gospel far afield. Ere long it was seeking a home for 
itself in the vast Graeco-Roman world. But what would 
be the fate of the religion of simple-minded Galilean 
countrymen when it was cast into the huge amalgam of 
races, customs and traditions that survived m that Rome- 
conquered world. After, possibly, arousing a passing 
interest in the minds of some who might be seeking com- 
pensation for the ruin of past hopes under the feet of 
their conquerors, it would promptly begin a course of 
deterioration and surely lose its distinctive character by 
absorption into the ethnic faiths that preceded it in 
those lands, or it would turn by reaction in the direction 
of that Jewish faith which it professed to supersede. 

That neither of these spiritual tragedies occurred was 
mainly due, it would seem, to the timely conversion of 
Saul, of Tarsus, the Pharisee who was to become the 
great Christian missionary. At the same time, it is quite 
possible—the epistles that bear his name suggest it— 
that the very success which he achieved was owing to 
the fact that in the awakened soul of this man the secret 
thoughts of many hearts were being revealed. At any 
rate, the most significant thing that appears in his career 
and his writings is the creation of a new religious com- 
munity that reflected the quality of his great soul. The 


42 


THE CHRISTIAN JEW TO THE GREEK 43 


Pauline message represents the first stage of the transi- 
tion from the Jewish to the Greek interpretation of sal- 
vation. A second stage appears in the writings of the 
Johannine type. In the literature that represents this 
second stage a great spiritual revolution comes to light. 
Even where the old phraseology is mixed with the new 
the old meaning has been transformed or lost. 


THE FIRST STAGE 
THE PAULINE INTERPRETATION 


Like the early Christian message to the Jew, Paul’s 
message to the Gentile centered in the idea of a divinely 
wrought deliverance. Salvation was the key-note. But 
the meaning of salvation, to him and his hearers, is the 
significant thing. Was it expressed in ways native to their 
thinking as well as to his? Or was there rather a carrying 
over into alien minds of forms of speech and act that left 
the inward mind of his hearers pretty much as it was 
before they heard him? Was his thinking really of the 
same character as it had been before, or did the contact 
with a new world transmute it into a new and original 
message as far as he was concerned? 

That Paul wished at first to give himself to the task 
of converting his fellow-Jews to the new faith is perfectly 
plain. That he met with ill success among them but won 
his way to the hearts of many Gentiles is equally plain. 
The explanation is to be found in his epistles. When they 
are placed side by side with the writings referred to in 
our former chapter the contrast is very marked. The 
phraseology, the point of view, the aim, the type of 
spiritual life represented are all different. The words and 
deeds of Jesus get but little attention and there is no 


44 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


concern to show that he is the Christ. Emphasis has 
shifted from a past career and an expected second coming 
to a new interest. The main concern now is to interpret 
the faith in Jesus in such a way as to satisfy those relig-. 
ious and moral aspirations of the peoples of the Graeco- 
Roman world which had survived the terrifying collision 
of the ethnic faiths thrown confusedly together by the 
Roman conquests. The Pauline writings record the strug- 
gles of an acutely sensitive soul with these tremendous 
issues. 

It is plain that, while Paul counted himself a Jew by 
spiritual inheritance, his spirit was in many respects much 
more akin to the Graeco-Roman. His attitude toward the 
Jewish scriptures is generally free. At times, it is true, he 
seems to take them to be literally the word of God but at 
other times, setting aside the “letter” in favor of the 
‘‘spirit,”’ he drives a critical wedge through the sacred 
writings. Again, when occasion demands it, literalism 
gives way to allegorism and symbolism. The explanation 
of the seeming self-contradictions of Paul is to be found, 
not in some rounded-out ‘“‘plan of salvation,” but in the 
longing of a spirit, renewed by contact with the divine, 
to communicate its secret to all men so as to unite all 
in one great communion. In a word, the Pauline writings 
are pervaded by the thrilling assurance that the divine 
personality who had flooded Paul’s own soul with the 
power to conquer all evil was able as well to impart this 
power to the whole world of men. Paul was a statesman- 


evangelist. While the primitive Christian expectation of a 
sudden return of Christ to ds,on the whole, 


a fading response in his soul, the prospect that really 
_ thrills him to ecstasy is the expectation that the whole 


THE CHRISTIAN JEW TO THE GREEK 45 


of mankind here and hereafter may be filled with the 
same purifying and quickening presence that pervaded 
his own spirit and made him over into a new man. Let 
us examine in outline the character of this wonderful 
man. 


I. THE SECRET OF PAUL AS A PREACHER OF HUMAN 
BETTERMENT LAY IN HIS DEEP AND SYMPA- 
THETIC INSIGHT INTO THE MASTER 
MOTIVE OF THE MORAL LIFE. 


1. Paul was not primarily a logical reasoner, philosopher 
or churchman, though all these traits are found in him, but 
he was an evangelist through and through. Only by slighting 
this fact can any one make him out to have been through- 
out a Jewish eschatologist, a sort of theoretical jurist in 
questions of human government, or a speculative cos- 
mologist. It would be much nearer the truth to say that 
he was all of these in part but none of them in particular. 
He engages in discursive reasoning at times but often, 
it would seem, according to the rules of logic, inconsist- 
ently. He discusses problems of jurisprudence but is 
without a juridical system. He thrusts out startling 
speculations about heaven and earth, time and eternity, 
but they are never wrought into a complete scheme of 
cosmic order. One might accept all of Paul’s theories 
along these lines and yet remain a stranger to his life’s 
motives. And one might reject them all in turn without 
losing the redemptive impulse of life he communicates. 
These forms of his thought are only the skeleton that 
conceals while it temporarily embodies the real man he 
was. In due time they all become antiquated and pass 
away. 


46 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


The same thing can be as truly said with respect to his 
statements about modes of divine worship, organizations 
of believers, methods of propaganda or formal doctrines. 
Paul was, at heart, neither liturgist, ecclesiastic, nor 
catechist. He was at heart a moralist, in the best sense of 
that oft-misused word. With him the emphasis is laid 
constantly on the morally wholesome in all the relations 
of life, whether it be in the life of the individual or the 
life of the community. That all men ought to be under 
the control of the high purpose that had come into 
possession of his soul; that they ought to be pure, just, 
kind, patient, forgiving, self-sacrificing and unwearied 
in love and labor for others; that they ought all to cultiv- 
ate those high virtues whose worth had been established 
in human experience the world over—in a word, that 
they ought to be men true and perfect in all their ways, 
men actually righteous (upright) in God’s sight—to bring 
this to pass was Paul’s supreme ambition. When he dis- 
courses, as he often does, on the subject of justification 
he is not thinking of a legal standing (even when he uses 
legal forms of speech), but of a right state of mind and 
heart and will. It was to bring this to pass that Christ, 
he believed, came to the world, died and rose to life 
immortal. 

2. Paul was in no sense a mere conventional moralist. 
To him the moral life was a very different thing from 
the keeping of specific commands or obedience to positive 
laws. He never fails to penetrate to its inner character. 
This was always to be wrought out, as he had found by 
experience, through bitter conflict, inward struggle. 
The issue in the case of every man was either a triumph 
or a tragedy and the outcome was to continue through 


THE CHRISTIAN JEW TO THE GREEK 47 


eternity. The spectacle of the struggle captivates his 
imagination. In all moral conflicts the presence of super- 
natural potencies could be discerned. His was an emo- 
tional morality, clothed with beauty as well as filled with 
vigor. For, to him, morality and religion were at bottom 
one. 

The clearness of perception, sternness of will and in- 
tensity of feeling with which Paul approached the issues 
of life are reflected in the severity of his judgment upon 
the heathen world. It was its deep-seated immorality 
that appalled him, that proved men to be reprobate of 
God and that made them, in the very processes of their 
nature, ‘‘children of wrath.” The fierce ancient prophetic 
arraignment of the ways of both Jew and Gentile is 
revived in Paul. Yet his was no abusive or malignant 
spirit. In him there was united with sternness of denun- 
ciation a sympathy with the moral yearnings of men 
everywhere and a power to idealize the life to which he 
invited them, that must have been very winsome. The 
exhortations addressed to the communities of believers, 
for whose sakes he wrought so bravely, attest it. Many 
pages might be filled with quotations. Our space permits 
the use of only one or two: 

“Finally, brethren, 
Whatsoever things are true, 
Whatsoever things are honorable, 
Whatsoever things are just, 
Whatsoever things are pure, 
Whatsoever things are lovely, 
Whatsoever things are of good report, 
If there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, 
Think on these things.” 
1Phil, 4:8 


/ 


48 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


‘Tet love be without hypocrisy. 

Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good. 

In love of the brethren be tenderly affectioned one to 
another; ) 

In honor preferring one another; 

In diligence not slothful; 

In spirit fervent; 

Serving the Lord; rejoicing in hope; patient in tribu- 
lation; 

Continuing steadfastly in prayer; communicating to the 
necessities of the saints; given to hospitality. 

Bless them that persecute you; bless and curse not. 

Rejoice with them that rejoice; weep with them that 
weep.” 

With Paul these things are not merely the product of 
salvation, they are the Christian’s salvation as a present, 
realized fact. He was no recluse who, wearied and dis- 
gusted with the world, retires to seclusion where he may 
indulge in the ecstasies of inward self-contemplation or 
in unsparing condemnation of the erring but struggling 
multitudes whom he has selfishly left behind. He was a 
man of the people and lived with them. He knew the life 
of his day. He had mingled freely with the mixed hordes 
of peoples that had floated into the great cities of the 
Empire and he witnessed the moral chaos which the 
obliteration of age-long customs and the extinction of 
the old-time deities had brought. It was the spiritual 
bewilderment and desolation of the times that contin- 
ually stirred him to new endeavors in the vicarious life 
which was the great gift of Christ to men. While it is true 
that Paul’s condemnation of the Gentile world is too 
sweeping, if meant to apply absolutely to every individual 


*Rom, 12:9-15 


THE CHRISTIAN JEW TO THE GREEK 49 


in it, his utterances truly and fitly express the vehemence 
of a courageous soul that has devoted itself to the war 
against all wickedness, neither gives nor accepts quarter, 
and knows the futility of any but heroic measures. More- 
over, his are not the words of a pessimist. Confident as he 
was that the condition of the world was bad, not less 
confident was he that he knew the remedy. 

3. The final clue to Paul’s estimate of his times and to 
his hopes for the future lies in his profound personal exper- 
zences. The source of his interpretation of life is not a 
Graeco-oriental philosophy but the Jewish religious 
faith. ‘To the Jew first and afterward to the Greek,” 
expresses the order of his own spiritual life. It took its 
point of departure from within the Jewish communion 
and it bore to the end the stamp of the emphatic Jewish 
conviction of the supremacy of ‘“‘righteousness.”’ Under 
the influence of his Pharisaic training this became the 
governing principle of his life and he obeyed its imperious 
demands to the end. He became a Christian because he 
found in Jesus Christ what he had long sought in vain in 
Judaism—a, righteousness of spirit and not merely of 
outer form, a righteousness that was an inner empowering 
and peace-giving principle and not conformity to an 
external but impotent command. 

In the first place, his experience of this power was 
catastrophic. Luke’s fine dramatization of it in the story 
of Paul’s prostration on the way to Damascus is finely 
symbolic of that moral-religious change which Paul 
himself recounts in psychological terms and at times 
speaks of as a divine ecstasy. He felt that that inward 
revolution was an experience of ‘‘things which it is not 
lawful for a man to utter,’’ but there comes repeatedly 


50 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


to expression in his epistles a consciousness of the radical 
and permanent character of that sudden transformation 
which saved him from moral helplessness and despair. 
The breaking in upon his soul of the sense of the moral 
grandeur of the Crucified, in striking contrast to the 
censorious self-righteousness of the Pharisee who sought 
by conformity to an external “law” to fit himself for the 
test of the final judgment, led him to see that the true 
righteousness could be attained only through a repetition 
in his own soul of the self-crucifixion expressed in the 
cross of Jesus. As he now looked back upon those early 
days he perceived that, notwithstanding his zeal for the 
letter of the law, he had borne. constantly in his heart an 
almost maddening sense of failure and heard in those days 
the low whisper of inner condemnation. He was inwardly 
divided. That early straining after righteousness was 
really a conflict between the lower and the higher prin- 
ciple in himself. He had failed in that struggle and was a 
beaten man. The law whose behest he had tried to obey, 
so far from coming to his mind as a vivifying and com- 
forting message, had had precisely the opposite effect. 
Operating as an outward restraint on sin, it had really 
goaded him on to the slavery of continual sinning. In a 
rhetorical passage, personifying law and sin he says: 
“T had not known sin except through the law . . . but 
sin, finding occasion, beguiled me through the command- 
ment and through it slew me.” His life, filled with inner 
contradiction, became an experience of moral impotence 
and death. The catastrophic end of the struggle is por- 
trayed in the closing words of the soliloquy: ‘‘O wretched 
man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of 
this death? I thank God, I am delivered, through Jesus 


Christ our Lord.”’ 
TRom. 7:7 ff 


THE CHRISTIAN JEW TO THE GREEK 51 


In the second place, sin and righteousness were to Paul 
directly antithetical. There could be no middle ground. 
The contrast between them was as between condemna- 
tion and acquittal, death and life. The issues of life being 
distinctly and absolutely moral, the breach with sin 
must always be correspondingly definite and thorough. 

~ Salvation meant this to him and, he felt, it must mean 
the same to all. It was moral deliverance.: ‘‘Know ye not 
that to whom ye present yourselves servants to obedience 
his servants ye are whom ye obey, whether of sin unto 
death or of obedience unto righteousness? But, being 
made free from sin, ye became servants of righteousness.’’ 
In all this Paul is the prototype of morally radical Chris- 
tians everywhere and especially of Protestant Christians. 

In the days of Paul, as at all times, this moral decisive- 
ness made a powerful appeal to sincere people because 
it had in it the tone of certainty that earnest people long 
for in times of moral confusion or discouragement. In the 
great Graeco-Roman world to which Paul consecrated 
his life there were many who sought to fulfil the moral 
imperative—there are always many—but lacked both 
the power to do it and the assurance that it could be done. 
Paul’s confidence that, through faith in the Crucified 
men come into possession of the secret of the righteous 
life, came to many as a mighty inspiration to live that 
life. They felt that they, too, might become the subjects 
of the working of a renewing and a purifying divine 
spirit. 

4. This love of righteousness and the assurance that in 
and through Christ men attain to it is, I repeat, funda- 
mental to Paulinism. Everything else in Paul’s teaching 
is tributary to it. Let his speculations range as widely as 


1Rom., 6:16, 17 


52 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


they may, in the end he always returns to this theme: 
the purpose for which Jesus Christ came into the world 
was that men should be righteous with a righteousness 
divine. He is 1‘‘not ashamed of the Gospel. . . for therein 
is revealed a righteousness of God from faith to faith.’’ 
If he treats of a question of casuistry, such as the pro- 
priety of a Christian eating meat that had been offered 
to an idol, he does not fail to remind his readers that 2“‘the 
kingdom of God is not eating and drinking’’—not a 
matter, that is, of external rules—‘‘but righteousness and 
peace and joy in the holy Spirit.’’ The mutual relations of 
members of the Christian communion are to be governed 
by the same principle: *“Know ye not that the unright- 
eous shall not inherit the Kingdom of God?” The new 
man that Christ brought into the world is a man whom 
God has ¢“‘created in righteousness and holiness of truth.”’ 
His own personal aim is, *“‘that I may gain Christ and be 
foundinhim ... having . . . the righteousness which 
is from God by faith.’ Quotations to the same effect 
might be multiplied indefinitely. Be it noted that this 
“righteousness”’ signifies no mere legal standing or formal 
relation—that would be going back to Pharisaism—but . 
such an inward controlling power to do good as he had 
experienced, an actual rightness of life within and with- 
out. Paul knew nothing of the fancied distinction be- 
tween a man’s “standing”? with God and his “state.” 
Paulinism stands not for a system of doctrine but for a 
type of life. 


1Rom. 1:16 2Rom., 13:17 31 Cor. 6:9 
*Eph. 4:26 5Phil. 3:9 





THE CHRISTIAN JEW TO THE GREEK 53 


II. PAULINISM TRACES THE EXPERIENCE OF MORAL RE- 
NEWAL TO AN ACT OF IMMEDIATE SELF-REVEL- 
ATION OF THE CRUCIFIED DIVINE 
CHRIST TO THE SOUL OF MAN. 


Paul’s experience seemed to him typical. The change 
in his life was grounded in the ineffable experience spoken 
of. It had a mystical aspect that appealed to the spirit of 
introspection common among orientals. How precisely it 
was that the crucifixion of Jesus could bring about the 
great moral revolution he had experienced he never quite 
succeeds in telling. He is never weary of speaking of 
“the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me,”’ 
or of saying that a self-crucifixion came with the discov- 
ery that the Crucified was the Son of God. Yet his own 
experience he regarded as such that all men might share 
it if they would. All who had made Christ’s self-com- 
mitment their own, had ‘‘crucified the flesh with the 
passions and the lusts thereof.’’ Through this new ideal- 
ism the whole world had already to his view passed 
through the expected cataclysm! and had taken on a new 
character. It is to this ineffable experience that Paul refers 
when he says that men are saved by faith. 

Paul’s inability to furnish a clearly intelligible explana- 
tion of the manner in which the Crucified made a new 
man of him was no impediment to the propagation of his 
experience in other people, but quite the reverse. Since 
all the great inspirations that come to us in moments of 
great heart-searching or of most intimate fellowship with 
other men, have in them something that defies analysis, 
it cannot seem very strange that the moral revolution 
through which we seem to be conscious of the presence of 
God should also defeat the effort of intelligence to trace 


42 Cor: 5:17 


54 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


the lightning-like rapidity of its movement. One’s cer- 
tainty of the transformation of his character is not dim- 
inished by any such failure of intellect to make it plain 
to the thought of another. Indeed, both its value and its 
appealing quality are thereby enhanced. It is when “‘deep 
ealleth unto deep” that our words produce the most 
telling effect. 

But at the same time, Paul, counting himself a true 
Jew, ‘‘according to the spirit,’’ and holding to the reality 
of a divine revelation in the Jewish scriptures, endeavors 
to interpret the higher Christian meaning into these 
scriptures and thereby to justify his estimate of those 
experiences to the minds of those who revered the scrip- 
tures as God’s word. In a highly rhetorical passage in 
Galatians! he represents Christ as bearing the deuterono- 
mic curse pronounced upon “every one that hangeth on a 
tree.’”’ How repugnant to the Jew the declaration that a 
criminal executed by the Roman rulers at the bidding of 
his own countrymen was the promised Messiah! With 
Paul the horror of the spectacle had been turned into 
exulting adoration as he read its meaning. For the vol- 
untarily endured cross brought deliverance to those who 
deserved the curse. The revelation of the holy and infinite 
love of Jesus smote his heart into contrition as he per- 
ceived the satanic madness of his early hatred and perse- 
cution of Christians. There was flashed into his mind a 
new ideal and a new inspiration. In Jesus’ act of supreme 
vicariousness he and all others might share. In such a 
self-devotion was revealed the way of sonship with God. 
In this and this alone the longed-for righteousness of God 
in men the world over is laid hold on. 


*Gal. 3:13 


THE CHRISTIAN JEW TO THE GREEK 55 


The epistle to the Romans presents in greater detail 
a message which is the same in substance. Unfortunately, 
Protestant orthodox theologians have commonly treated 
the first four chapters of this great epistle as containing 
the substance of the whole work and not, which they 
ought to have done, as purely preparatory to a statement 
of the content of Paul’s personal religious experience. 
Consequently, Paul’s free, emotional utterances have 
been turned into a formal legal doctrine of salvation— 
the very same sort of thing as the Pharisees had done 
with the Jewish scriptures. The doctrine is about as 
follows: All men, without exception, are sinful by inher- 
ited nature and by deed. Being guilty before the bar of 
God, they are doomed to eternal punishment, unless a 
substitute can be found. Christ, the Son of God, is that 
divinely appointed substitute. The guilt, by divine 
prerogative, being legally imputed to him, he endured in 
his own divine-human person the punishment due. 
Hence it is possible for God justly to regard those for 
whom Christ died as having satisfied the demands of his 
law. Upon their personal exercise of faith in this atone- 
ment they are duly counted righteous. 

The foregoing is in substance the theory of the basis 
of salvation ascribed to Paul by Calvinism. It seems to 
overlook the fact that the early portion of the epistle to 
the Romans constitutes Paul’s apologetic addressed to 
the mind of people who had been trained, as he had been, 
in Jewish legalism. His method of argument is suited to 
that cast of thought. A distinction must always be made 
between one’s faith and his theoretical justification of it. 
The faith may survive the collapse of its defense. The 
rabbinical training that served Paul so well in argument 


56 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


with Jews would be quite helpless in the presence of the 
Greek mind and might easily conceal his true inner char- 
acter from his hearer. Paul’s inherited legalism was alien — 
to the spiritually-minded Greek and, as well, to the genius 
of his own faith. 

The soul of Paulinism is found in Paul’s experience of 
a moral transformation in himself. This inner revolution 
he traced to an intuition (vision, revelation) of the mean- 
ing of the crucifixion of Jesus whom the Christians called 
the Christ. It was a light from heaven that, he felt, flashed 
into his soul when he saw the Son of God in that sufferer. 
The pain and the shame of that death, the tragedy of it 
all, revealed the moral grandeur of the Crucified. The 
death of Jesus marked the culmination and perfection of 
his self-devotion to God’s will to save the world. The 
‘“Tudgment”’ and the ‘‘curse”’ that fell upon Jesus reflected 
the judgment and the curse under which Paul himself 
and every other man was suffering. It all served to dis- 
close to his awakened conscience the selfishness, the fail- 
ure, the moral impotence, the unworthiness of the whole 
of his past career. The sentence of death that fell upon 
Jesus was a divine pronouncement of death upon the life 
which Paul had lived hitherto. He had died with Christ. 
The resurrection of the Christ was Paul’s own rising to a 
new life. The ‘Son of God was revealed” in Paul. One 
might say that Paul objectifies his own experience when 
he interprets into Christ’s sublime act of self-devotion 
the spiritual process that went on in Paul’s soul. And we 
might as truly say that he appropriates to his own sub- 
jective experience the experience which he believed was 
the lot of Jesus Christ. For him they were one and the 
same event. He was one with Christ in it all. Christ’s 


THE CHRISTIAN JEW TO THE GREEK 57 


deed, in all the power and worth of it, was mystically 
Paul’s own. Henceforth there was nothing in moral 
achievement impossible to him. He was dead to the old 
life and alive to the new. 

Right here is found the great secret of the power of 
the Pauline message to the Graeco-oriental religious mind. 
Naturally, in the epistle known as, ‘“‘to the Romans,”’’ 
he undertakes to interpret the Jewish picture of a Mes- 
siah who died, was buried, and rose up from the grave 
to the sky in the terms of an inner moral cataclysm and 
recreation of humanity. He would universalize his own 
experience. Adopting the Greek antithesis of ‘‘flesh”’ 
and ‘‘spirit’’ he sees, on the one hand, the principle of 
evil at work in his own “members” bringing forth “‘fruit 
unto death,” and the ‘“‘spirit’”’ (which he calls the “spirit 
of God,” “‘spirit of Christ,” ‘‘Christ,”’ or just “‘the spirit’’) 
bringing forth the ‘fruits of righteousness,” or “life 
eternal.” 

It seems to me utterly impossible for any one to reduce 
all Paul’s statements on this subject to a logically con- 
sistent system of doctrine. His mind was not of the kind 
that could submit itself to an order of that kind. But it 
is quite plain that for him the Jewish externalistic, juridi- 
cal view of salvation has given place to a view of salvation 
that makes it a vital, moral process. The self-giving of 
Christ on the cross becomes his self-giving to the believer 
in all the power of his divine vicariousness. And faith is 
no mere believing of information and no mere ‘‘means”’ of 
salvation. It zs salvation, since it is the act of personal 
union with Christ in purpose and career. We have no 
space for a detailed treatment of Paul’s utterances on this 
subject but must leave that to the reader. 


58 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


Ill) THE PAULINE GOSPEL GAINED ACCESS TO THE GREEK 
MIND LARGELY BY ITS APPEAL TO THE SPIRITUAL 
YEARNINGS WHICH HAD BEEN FOSTERED BY THE GRAE- 
CO-ORIENTAL CULTURE AND HAD SURVIVED THE 
ROMAN CONQUEST. THE CHRISTIAN JEW HERE 
FOUND GROUND COMMON TO HIMSELF AND 
THE PIOUS GREEK. 


In his many journeys Paul’s course of travel gravitated 
toward the religious groups that were to be found in the 
great commercial centers of his time. He found open to 
him an inner affiliation with these people. His announce- 
ment of the faith in Christ was often accompanied with 
polemical deliverances, as he confronted the various 
religious philosophies current among them: But if that 
very polemic was to be effective in a constructive way it 
must be clothed in the terms of the higher qualities of the 
spiritual life already cultivated among these religious 
groups. The situation could be boldly met by recognizing 
the worthful features of their life and seeking to transform 
these into a distinctly Christian faith. If, as Paul claimed, 
God was God of the Gentile as well as of the Jew, why 
should not the utterance of the religious life of the heath- 
en become as fitting a vesture of the Christian faith as 
was that which came from the Jew? Paul, with his human 
sympathy, spirituality and moral certitude instinctively 
sought this natural way of approach to the ethnic relig- 
ious spirit. The epistles to the Corinthian, Colossian and 
Ephesian Christians indicate the manner in which this 
was done. 

In the many ancient secret cults, known to us common- 
ly as ‘‘mystery religions,’’ there were observed rites and 


THE CHRISTIAN JEW TO THE GREEK 59 


ceremonies that were supposed to impart to the initiates 
a mystical enlightenment that lifted them above the 
common, secular, physical plane of existence into a com- 
munion with deity beyond the power of language to 
describe or of thought to conceive. Paul evidently had 
contacts with these views and practices and, with the 
keen insight of the genuine evangelist, aimed at assuring 
people of this type that what they sought for but could 
not find was now offered to them, not in pantomime but 
in reality. The true God now invited them to enter into 
communion with himself in the Spirit. In place of the 
“wisdom,” or philosophy, “that knew not God,” he pre- 
sents the true ‘wisdom from God.”’ This? ‘‘mystery’”’ was 
now revealed in Christ to all who would receive it— 
Christ, no longer known according to the flesh, no mere 
fact of past history, but a divine Spirit working redempt- 
ively in the hearts of men and, indeed, in the whole uni- 
verse. The time had now come ‘‘to make all men see 
what is the dispensation of the mystery which for ages 
hath been hid in God,” ‘‘the eternal purpose which God 
purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord,’’ the purpose that the 
“breadth and length and height and depth of the love of 
God” might come to all mankind through the dwelling of 
Christ in their hearts. Thereby men may become ‘“‘filled 
into all the fullness of God.” 

The mystery religions presented dramatic representa- 
tions of a divinity undergoing death and rising again with 
more potent life, as nature dies with the approach of 
winter and revives in the spring. These mere images of 
reality were now bound to disappear, by the coming of 
the Son of God from the heavens to suffer a real death 
and to rise again to life immortal, that is, the life now 
1 Eph, 3:4 ff 


60 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


offered to all who would join themselves to him.! “For 
in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily 
and in him ye are made full.’’ Here is the true enlight- 
enment and the true redemption. God has? “‘delivered us 
out of the power of the darkness and translated us into 
the kingdom of the Son of his love.’ 

In the hands of Paul the traditional gospel was in 
principle transmuted into a new form. The popular nar- 
ratives of past fact and the pictorial sketches of future 
fact, so characteristic of the preaching of early Jewish 
converts, give place to the conception of a divine prin- 
ciple working savingly in the inner life of men. Herein 
lies the secret of the spiritual power of ancient Cath- 
olicism. 

But at the same time the door was open to’a progressive 
paganization of the Christian faith. The ancient ablu- 
tions, sacred feasts and incantations through which it 
was supposed that the “‘energy” of a divinity worked in 
men and made them one with himself, divine, immortal, 
reappear in modified form and with modified meaning 
in the baptism, the eucharist and other ritual forms of the 
Catholic Church. The renewing of men in the image of 
God was metaphysical rather than moral in its aim, and 
the methods used are magical rather than intelligible. 

When Paul goes still further and suggests a cosmic 
philosophy that makes of salvation itself a cosmic pro- 
cess; when he pictures Christ as victor in a conflict? with 
the “thrones, dominions, principalities and powers” that 
dwelt in the higher regions and seek to accomplish our 
defeat and ruin, his rhetorical utterances were susceptible 
of a literal interpretation. The doctrine of salvation 
would then be turned into a theory of cosmic redemption. 
1Col, 2:9 °Col. 1:13 °See Col. and Eph, 


THE CHRISTIAN JEW TO THE GREEK 61 


If it were carried still further into the realm of mystery 
it would leave the human personality the helpless subject 
of forces in the realm of the supernatural—the very 
thing that happened in Catholicism. 

Comment: It seems a far cry indeed from the simple 
Jewish expectation of Messiah’s return from the skies to 
judge the world and save his people to this hope of a 
transmutation of the universe. But Paul seems to have 
felt no violent break in the trend of his mind as he passed 
from the one to the other. The explanation lies in the fact 
that his ultimate interest lay neither in the one nor the 
other but in the personality of Jesus Christ, of whose 
worth either might become on occasion a suitable picture. 
In that divine personality lay the power to work the 
inner, moral renovation of humanity. Theories as such 
had but little hold on him. Paul’s various dramatic 
representations of the career and significance of Jesus 
were all tributary to his presentation of the sublime self- 
devotion by which Jesus of Nazareth inaugurated a 
progressive moral renewal of humanity. This is the 
essence of his message to the Greek. 


A SECOND STAGE 
THE JOHANNINE INTERPRETATION 


As the years passed and Jesus came not from the skies 
nor gave the looked-for signs of his coming to avenge and 
save his people, there was danger lest the early faith pass 
into the frenzy of fanaticism or the gloom of despair. 
In none of the New Testament books is the struggle with 
such a spirit of pessimism more vividly reflected than in 
the series of visions known as the Apocalypse of John. 


62 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


Whether the author be the same person as the John of 
the Gospel matters little to us here. If the Apocalypse be 
interpretable as a sort of drama or allegory, it may be so. 
The Pauline message had already set aside in principle, 
if not always explicitly, the hope in a coming cosmic 
catastrophe. In the Gospel and the first epistle of John - 
the Pauline view is developed in a definite direction. The 
aim is to turn the thoughts of Christians away from the 
futile waiting for outer events, that were never to happen, 
to the present all-satisfying sense of an abiding presence 
in the heart and a holy fellowship with God that outward 
conditions could never destroy. Doubtless, in the Johan- 
nine view itself lurked a subtle danger, the danger of 
turning the actual personal human career of Jesus into a 
theophany. This came at a later time. But, for John, the 
earthly life was real and he bases his view of salvation 
on it. 

1. While the Gospel of John opens with a kind of 
philosophic poem that recalls the poem of creation in the 
book of Genesis, the writer’s real interest is linked neither 
with the beginning nor with the end of the world as such but 
with the character of the spiritual forces at work in the 
hearts of the men who live in it. One might almost say that 
his Gospel is itself a sustained poem. For the events in 
Jesus’ career which it portrays have interest for him 
only as they appear symbolical of the life of the spirit and 
eternal truth. They are ‘‘signs” that “manifested forth 
his glory,”—that divine quality which is yet to be dis- 
closed to his disciples in its fullness and to be fully shared 
by them when they shall “see him as he is.’”’ The Gospel 
and the Epistle read almost like a commentary on the 
great saying of Paul: ‘‘The Lord is the Spirit. . . . We 


THE CHRISTIAN JEW TO THE GREEK 63 


all with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory 
of the Lord, are transformed into the same image, from 
glory to glory, even as from the Lord, the Spirit.’ For 
both writers this is the final salvation. 

The essential content of John’s message may be 
expressed formally in the following propositions: The 
world of men lies in moral darkness. Salvation can come 
only by the revelation of the true God. Since he is Spirit, 
the revelation must be within men and cannot be truly 
understood as outward. This revelation of the true God 
is in his Son, Jesus Christ, the pre-existent, who came to 
men in a personal human life. By the communication to 
believers of the spirit that was in him he makes them 
possessors of this revelation. They are inwardly and 
eternally one with the Son of God and stand with him 
over against the unbelieving world, which is condemned 
eternally to death. 

2. The Johannine message is addressed to the religiously- 
minded Greek. The beautiful recital of some events al- 
ready narrated in the earlier Gospels, along with the new 
scenes described, aims throughout at convincing his 
readers that Jesus had lived on the earth as a divine per- 
son who redeems men from sin by bringing them into 
oneness of thought, feeling and will with himself and, 
therefore, with God, who is called Father. This was the 
answer to the longing of the Greek for an assurance of 
participation in the divine nature. 

Jesus’ manifestation of the true Light does not cease 
with his death. Death was only his way of departure to 
the invisible realm from which he came. But this very 
departure is the way by which he came into the hearts 
of men more fully than was possible while he was visible. 


64 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


He comes again, it is true, and he has come again already 
—‘‘now are we Sons of God’’—as the enlightening, puri- 
fying, immortalizing spirit within them. Thus both the 
Jewish way of conceiving the relation of Jesus to God and 
men and the Greek way of conceiving the relation of the 
human to the divine coalesce and, in the Johannine 
message, are transmuted into a higher moral significance. 
The way was opened for men who were Greeks by spirit- 
ual breeding and alien to the Jewish mind to abandon the 
latter and retain only the former without ceasing to be 
Christian. We shall see this come to pass later. 

3. The Johannine interpretation acknowledges no fixed 
outer forms of faith. God dwells in men’s minds, not in 
these forms. Worship is not associated with places but 
with the Spirit. Jesus baptizes men in the Spirit. At 
death he departs to the dwelling-place of God, that is, in 
the inner life of men. Physical and racial relations give 
place to the spiritual. Over against communities of the 
flesh stands the community of believers, the true flock 
of God. 

Naturally, no interest is taken, so far, that is, as actual 
statements go, in the genealogy of Jesus or the manner 
of his birth. His true being is always from heaven and 
his knowledge and works proceed from that source. The 
significance of his healings and other wonders lies in the 
signs they give of his unity with God. With the reaction 
against the hope of a physical return and its attendant 
material gains, comes the affirmation that the final 
judgment takes place here and now. Instead of a distant 
resurrection at the last day—a remote consolation for a 
mourner—there comes from Jesus the sweeping assur- 
ance:! “I am the resurrection and the life. He that believ- 


1John 11:25, 26 


THE CHRISTIAN JEW TO THE GREEK 65 


eth in me though he die, yet shall he live; and he that 
_ liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”’ Instead of the 
final discourses on a mountain, in the earlier Gospels, 
foretelling the destruction of the present order of the 
universe, there occurs in John’s story a series of conversa- 
tions in a private room with heart-searchings and ques- 
tionings on the part of the disciples and the answering 
assurance on Jesus’ part that the bond between him and 
them was as inviolable as the bond of union between 
him and the Father. For the two were of the same nature. 

4, In the Johannine message there is steady reliance ona 
knowledge that is super-rational. But it comes to men, not 
by means of incantations or mysteries or ecstasies, but 
rather through faith, an enlightened trust in a supreme 
divine personality revealed in time. This is more than a 
means to life. It zs life. This higher knowledge is more 
than an intellectual act. It is a moral act. Darkness is 
more than intellectual dullness, it is perverseness and 
depravity. Light is inseparable from love and darkness 
from hate. Truth is right direction of the will as well as 
freedom from ignorance and deception. The life that 
came to men in Jesus is no mere continuance eternally in a 
divine substance or nature (cf. the Greek). It is the right 
adjustment of the whole inner being of the man to the 
will of God. 

Yet, it must be added, one does not find in John the 
broad Pauline interest in and sympathy with the pract- 
ical difficulties that confront men in their secular callings, 
nor has he Paul’s optimism as to the future remoulding 
of all these, so that the will of God is fulfilled in them 
also. Though he affirms most beautifully and impressively 
that God loved the whole world, he does not seem to 


66 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


have looked for arly such world-conquest, by the new 
faith, as Paul hoped for. John’s message is a gospel of 
salvation from the world, rather than of the world. It is 
enjoyed only within the beloved community of believers. 
If, then, it is to be said that the Johannine message 
interiorized and universalized the Gospel by its appeal. 
to the deep spiritual longings of mankind, it must also 
be said that this message unintentionally prepared the 
way for the sacramentalism that is of the essence of 
Catholicism. 

The present chapter may well conclude with a few 
words as to the interpretation of the Christian salvation 
offered in the epistle to the Hebrews. To say, as has often 
been said, that its aim is to show that human salvation 
was procured once for all by the bloody sacrifice of Christ 
at a definite time and presented by him to God in Heaven 
as the basis of our forgiveness, is misleading. It mistakes 
the drapery of the teaching for its real body. The author 
is concerned with the prophetical activity of Christ 
rather than his priestly mediation. The value of the 
priestly system of the past lies in its truly prophetic 
character. By means of the allegorical method of inter- 
pretation the whole priestly system of the Jews is made 
tributary to the revelation that is final and complete in 
Christ. If Jesus is the great High Priest, it is not because 
he offered a sacrifice to God in the sense in which sacrifices 
for propitiation were offered of old, not because he en- 
dured the penalty of human sinning when he died, but 
because in his whole career, culminating in his death, he 
has mediated the true knowledge of God to men. He is 
the ‘“‘word of God, living and active’? in men. Men are 
saved by divine illumination, by inward revelation. 


THE CHRISTIAN JEW TO THE GREEK 67 


When the author says that men are saved by faith he 
refers to their conscious possession of truth and to that 
power to overcome opposition and danger of all kinds, 
which is the reward of reaching forward to spiritual reali- 
ties not yet present. Faith is vastly more than a receptive 
attitude, more than a personal confiding and trust. 
It is an organ for the apprehension of that for which 
the world was made, for beholding in anticipation the 
eternal ‘city, whose builder and maker is God.” Faith 
in Jesus is confidence in the way of life of One who passed 
through all the stages of human striving and suffering 
and reached divine perfection in actual experience. 

The writer was one of those great leaders of Christian 
thought who sought to mediate between the early Chris- 
tian traditions and their use of the Jewish scriptures, on 
the one hand, and the Neoplatonic philosophy of religion, 
on the other. That philosophy was the consolation of 
many people who had lost confidence in the old crude 
faiths and sought refuge in a philosophy which told how 
through enlightenment, by a redemptive process, a 
fallen world might return to the divine source from which 
it came at the first. We place the writer of Hebrews by 
the side of John. Both sought to enhance the primitive 
Christian faith by developing it into a philosophy of 
salvation, the way to the perfect life of light and love. 
The idea of deliverance from the power of demons and 
the horrors of an approaching cosmic tragedy is giving 
place to the assurance of inward illumination that makes 
one a possessor of the invisible and eternal as a present 
reality. Jesus is becoming not so much a memory as a 
personal potency imparted to the spirits of men. We 
shall see this naturalized and institutionalized in Cath- 
olicism. 


68 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


Comment: When the Christian Gospel was carried out 
into the non-Jewish world a two-fold change came over 
the minds of its bearers. In the first place, they found 
themselves confronted with the social, economic and 
political conditions of that larger world. They were 
compelled to place themselves in a positive, constructive 
relation to the ways and institutions of that world. The 
new Christian communities that arose had no regular 
connection with the temple at Jerusalem or the Jewish 
synagogue in any place. They were not of the Jewish 
order. Their natural affiliations were with the institutions 
of the people from whom their members were drawn. 
Under the initiative and guidance of such men of pro- 
phetic spirit and statesmanlike genius as the apostle 
Paul the way was opened for the Christianizing of the 
institutions of the Roman Empire, as Sir William M. 
Ramsay has pointed out, in his ““St. Paul the Traveller and 
the Roman Citizen.”’ The distinct implication was that 
institutions of non-Jewish peoples could be regarded as 
having a divine origin and as being truly preparatory to 
the spread of the Christian faith. The natural outcome 
appeared in due time. Christian institutions took an 
active part in shaping the whole order of life of the na- 
tions in whose midst they were planted. 

In the second place, there sprang up in the minds of 
Christians a new interpretation of their faith. With the 
Jewish scriptures in their hands, they continued to 
express it in terms that accorded with the Jewish modes 
of religious utterance. But this was a somewhat artificial 
practice for men whose traditional modes of thought were 
of another mould. The Grecian-taught man brought with 
him into the new communion conceptions inherited from 


THE CHRISTIAN JEW TO THE GREEK 69 


his former life-relations. If he was to be addressed intelli- 
gently he must be appealed to through these. When the 
Gospel was being uttered far and wide in the Grecian 
tongue Grecian conceptions were added to the traditional 
Jewish ways of thinking and began in many places to 
displace them. The inevitable corollary—though for a 
long time it might not be explicit in the Christian mind 
—was the admission and affirmation of a divine prepara- 
tion of the Greek mind for the new faith. There was a 
feeling of inner affinity between the Christian faith, on 
the one hand, and Grecian religion, science and philoso- 
phy, on the other hand, and that too without necessary 
detriment to the new faith. In fact, it might prove an 
enhancement. 

In such a marriage of the faith to ethnic types of spirit- 
uality there was, of course, the grave danger of a pagani- 
zation of Christianity. That this occurred gradually and 
on a vast scale has been pointed out by Adolf Harnack 
in his great work, History of Dogma. But what he has 
not said, though he might have done so with equal jus- 
tice—the meaning of our Christian faith has received 
thereby a vast enrichment and a pathway was made for 
its conquest of humanity. The men whose works have 
been briefly characterized in this chapter were the great 
pioneers in the winning of this richer interpretation of the 
Christian salvation. And so must it ever be. 


CHAPTER IV 


CATHOLIC SACRAMENTALISM 


A hundred and fifty years after the birth of Christ 
the Christian body was made up almost entirely of Gen- 
tiles. A hundred and fifty years later the outstanding 
Christian fact is the organized Catholic Church. In 
these three hundred years multitudes of litthe Christian 
communities (churches) had sprung up, each of them a 
local center of influences making for the remoulding of 
the life of the peoples of the Roman Empire and regions 
beyond. Fierce opposition from other faiths, public 
opprobrium showered upon them, physical violence 
encouraged by suspicious officials, and the severe and 
prolonged persecutions at the hands of political authori- 
ties had failed to shake their confidence or dampen their 
evangelistic zeal. Conflict served only to strengthen them 
by raising up leaders of genius and courage under whose 
generalship was developed an organization that might 
well be regarded as a rival to the imperial system itself. 
The bishops (overseers) of the churches steadily worked 
toward the union of the many churches in the bonds of a 
common faith, a mutual sympathy and support in times 
of trial, and a system of communication that enabled 
them to keep in touch with all the churches. By thus 
welding together the many churches in one Catholic 
(universal) Church the danger of destruction at the 
hands of foes from without was surmounted. No physical 
force, no political power could annihilate the faith. 


70 


CATHOLIC SACRAMENTALISM 71 


But there remained the danger of destruction from 
within. There was the menace of a spiritual disunity. 
Peoples of many races, nations and languages, repre- 
senting many varieties of tradition, culture and customs 
mingled as votaries of the new faith. Many variant 
interpretations of the faith naturally appeared. Contro- 
versy and inner strife portended disintegration and weak- 
ness. There was need, it seemed, of some authoritative 
declaration that might stand as a basis of common belief 
and action. This might involve the exclusion of dissidents 
but that seemed not too high a price to pay for union and 
safety. 

The movement was hastened through the accession to 
the throne of the Caesars of Constantine, son of a Chris- 
tian mother and friend to the new faith. Constantine’s 
interests were doubtless mainly political. If he could make 
the bishops faithful subjects of the Empire and the whole 
Church a constituent part of the instrument of govern- 
ment, it would facilitate the union of the vast Roman 
territories in one mighty system under his own imperial 
control. The bishops could not fail to see that new possi- 
bilities of power were thereby thrown open to the Church. 
Might she not also become imperial in her sway? When, 
in response to his summons, they met in Council at 
Nicaea in A.D. 325, the statement of their creed bore an 
ecclesiastico-political as well as a religio-philosophical 
character. The conception of the nature and the means of 
salvation that has held ever since the dominant place 
in the Catholic system was mainly shaped by those two 
influences. The former became dominant in Western 
Catholicism and the latter in Eastern Catholicism. 


72 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


Not long after Constantine’s reign the Empire became 
dual, a Western Empire with Rome as its capital and 
an Eastern Empire with its capital at the new city of 
Constantine, Constantinople. Correspondingly, the one 
Catholic Church became virtually two churches, both 
claiming to be Catholic, but with significant differences. - 
Both might formally acknowledge the one creed but their 
interpretations of it would differ according to the genius 
of each church. The genius of the Greek is found in his 
gift of philosophic speculation, that of the Roman in his 
practical sense, his capacity for government. The Greek 
interpretation of the creed turns one’s mind to questions 
concerning the ultzmate nature of things; the Roman, to 
questions concerning the established order. If the Roman 
repeated the words of a creed identical withthe creed of 
the Greek, nevertheless, he probably failed to enter 
deeply into the Greek’s thought just as the Roman 
philosopher borrowed his ideas from the Greeks but never - 
understood the soul of Greek philosophy. But he knew 
better how to use the creed as an instrument for securing 
order and safety. The Greek was more closely in sym- 
pathy with the speculative, meditative mind of the East, 
while the Roman was more in sympathy with the restless, 
self-assertive, hard-to-manage mind of the West. Their 
respective conceptions of human salvation we shall find 
to differ correspondingly. 


I. THE EASTERN (GREEK) CATHOLIC WAY OF SALVATION 


In the religious faiths of the East the mystical element 
was in control. It retained its high place in the life of the 
Eastern Catholic Church. The Roman military and 
political conquest might be expected to carry with it the 


CATHOLIC SACRAMENTALISM 73 


conquest of the deities and the extinction of the faiths of 
the conquered. But their destruction was far from com- 
plete. They survived, as we have seen, in the mystery 
religions. Indeed, it was a feature of the shrewd Roman 
policy to leave intact the ethnic social customs, religious 
traditions and rituals so long as they did not collide with 
Roman authority. They even went so far as to grant 
official recognition to certain deities and to the observa- 
tion of some of the mysteries that concerned the upper 
classes of society, the Eleusinian, the Orphic and the 
Dionysian mysteries. The religions of the masses of the 
people in Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Palestine and Egypt 
survived the conquest but, having no legal standing, their 
rites could continue to be observed only in secret. Now 
the vast majority of Christian converts were from the 
masses of the common people. The Christian religion, 
being itself under the legal ban (religio illicita), met a 
sympathetic hearing from the first from many votaries 
of the “‘private’”’ religions. It was but natural, therefore, 
that there should be an infiltration into the Christian . 
religion of the ideas, motives and hopes of these tradi- 
tional religions and that the symbols or cryptic utter- 
ances in which the meaning and power of these faiths were 
customarily supposed to be conveyed to the initiates while 
concealed from others, should pass over into the Chris- 
tian faith, though with some change. There was a wide- 
spread revival of religion generally in the time of Christ. 
The ancient Catholic faith grew up in this atmosphere 
and absorbed it in part. If, then, there was a Christianiz- 
ing of paganism there was also in process a corresponding 
paganization of Christianity. 


74 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


The mystery cults were connected with stories of divin- 
ities, which were at the same time nature-myths. Pro- 
cesses of nature were identified with the activities or 
sufferings of the divinities. The great theme was death 
and restoration to life. The picturesque phenomena of 
winter and spring furnished the prevailing coloring. The 
death of vegetation in winter and its reappearing alive 
in the spring signalized the death and resuscitation of 
divinity. If men could be in some way united with this 
divinity might they not share in the risen life? It is note- 
worthy that the feasts that celebrated the rising of divini- 
ties from the dead were kept in the springtime. These 
myths, taken at their best and apart from coarse or 
immoral tales that sometimes constituted a feature of 
them, portray the deep longings of all men for redemption 
from the death that is inevitable for all. In the pain and 
wretchedness of conquered peoples there lay a powerful 
incentive to turn to the promise of sharing in the im- 
mortality of a risen divinity. To such people salvation 
must be a redemption, redemption from death and from 
all the powers that bring it upon us. 

The Christian announcement of the resurrection of 
Jesus made a powerful appeal to the religiosity of the 
East. The certified fact of his death and resurrection, 
joined to the calm confidence with which Christians 
faced death, their purity and nobility of life, their tender 
interest in the condition of the suffering and the erring, 
their firm allegiance to Jesus, and their loyalty to one 
another, brought to inquiring souls assurance that the 
desire for a mystical union with deity was at last truly 
to be satisfied. 


CATHOLIC SACRAMENTALISM 75 


The outward means of effecting this transformation of 
human nature into the likeness of the divine were at 
hand. Candidates for initiation into the ancient mys- 
teries were subjected to certain ceremonies, such as, 
fasting and other preparatory ascetical practices, a so- 
journ in the darkness of some secret cave, a pantomime 
of death and resurrection, baptism in water or (as in 
Mithraism) in blood, a sacred meal, repetition of incanta- 
tions, laying on of hands, and finally the sealing of the 
initiate with the name of the divinity. In his excitement 
he might be carried into a frenzy or ecstasy accompanied 
with visions of future bliss. He was supposed to have 
been united by this ritual to the divinity so as to be 
raised at last to the heavenly realm and made immortal. 
With this transmutation of nature came also the im- 
partation, supposedly, of a secret knowledge or inspira- 
tion. Thus were men saved from darkness, corruption 
and death. If we remember that the Christian Gospel 
was mainly propagated in those early days of its history 
by the spontaneous zeal of ordinary people, that the com- 
mon highways, the well-sides, and the bazaars were the 
places of easiest contact, and that the ideas that were 
transmitted from man to man were unordered, informal 
and free, we can easily see that it was inevitable that the 
Christian narratives should be metamorphosed into the 
story of the coming of a divinity in human flesh to save 
men from their undivine, darkened, erring, corrupt, 
mortal nature and that the Christian liturgical practices 
should be viewed as the means of accomplishing in those 
who received them the longed for change. Thus far of 
the multitudes of untaught converts. 


76 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


What of the educated and intelligent? With them a 
sympathetic understanding of the religious cravings of 
the masses was united with a philosophy that was akin 
to these in spirit. This philosophy was a cosmology, a 
theory of knowledge, an ethic and a soteriology in one. 
The whole of existence as at present constituted was 
held to be composed of two opposed constituents, matter 
and spirit. The world in its present order was evil, since 
spirit, the higher substance, had been mixed with and 
subjected to matter, the lower substance, through the 
action of semi-personal evil powers. Light or true knowl- 
edge, which pertains to spirit alone, was thereby shrouded 
in darkness; ignorance, error, evil-doing and death were 
the outcome. The only way of escape lay in a great re- 
versal. Spirit must be redeemed from its bondage to 
matter, the light of heaven must dispel the darkness, 
good take the place of evil, and life the place of death. 
The only way in which this could come about was by the 
incoming of a higher divinity who would expel the lower 
and evil divinities, release our spirits from their bondage, 
impart his own nature to us, and thereby bring to us 
light, knowledge, goodness and life immortal. Salvation 
would thus be a process of cosmic redemption. 

In this theory the personal and the non-personal, the 
moral and the non-moral were confused. Sin or evil was 
not so much guilt as it was misfortune, darkness, error, 
unhappiness. The Gospel was not so much a clearly 
apprehensible message addressed to the intelligence as it 
was rather an allegory. Baptism and the Supper were 
not so much forms of confession and self-commitment as 
they were magical acts having a secret, divine, incom- 
prehensible efficacy in them. These, rather than a ra- 


CATHOLIC SACRAMENTALISM 77 


tional statement of truth, became the means of salvation. 
They became holy mysteries to be celebrated with the 
pronouncement of the name of Jesus Christ, the Divine 
One, who had come to redeem. 

We perceive why it was that controversies arose con- 
cerning the nature of Jesus. Since the Christian mysteries 
were celebrated with the pronunciation of his name and 
the Christian hope of salvation lay in union with him, 
the issue at stake was, whether there was a real com- 
munication of deity to the recipients of these Christian 
“‘mysteries.”?’ Were they truly united to deity in the 
Baptism? Did they truly partake of him in the Supper? 

We find here the explanation of the importance at- 
tached to the question respecting the right to adminis- 
ter the true mysteries (Latin—sacraments) in the contro- 
versies that took place between different ecclesiastical 
bodies. For, as was supposed, that body which possessed 
the true sacraments must be solely competent to minister 
salvation. Herein also lies the explanation of the fact 
that the great controversies among Christians in those 
times turned on the question of the essential deity of 
Jesus Christ. In the face of a confusing polytheism Chris- 
tians emphasized the doctrine of monotheism above all 
else. In the impartation of the nature of deity alone could 
real redemption be found. But, from the very first, 
Christians had also preached salvation through Jesus 
Christ alone, the Son of God. If he be truly Saviour, his 
nature must be identical with the nature of the one only 
true God. Otherwise the salvation that he brought could 
not be perfect, another must be called upon to complete 
the work of redemption. All other so-called divinities 
must be only demons, able to impart only a demonic 


78 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


nature to men. Christ came to drive out the demons and 
save men from those evil powers whose fruit was death. 
At his reascension to heaven he had intrusted to his 
Church, his body on earth, the right and the power to 
minister his divine nature in the ‘‘Christian’’ mysteries. 
The all-important practical question was, how to discover 
this true Church and receive salvation at her hands. 

The “‘notes,’”’ or marks, of the true Church were affirmed 
to be holiness, catholicity and apostolicity. She possessed 
holiness, that is, she had charge of the holy mysteries that 
separated the subjects to whom they were ministered 
from the evil world to which all pertained by nature. 
She possessed catholicity, that is, the whole of the en- 
lightened and purified among men were to be found in 
this church and none elsewhere. She possessed apostolic- 
ity, that is, the authority of the original apostles, given 
to them by Christ, was exercised solely by her. An evi- 
dence of this is seen in her preservation of the true 
apostolic doctrine. Consequently, we find the Catholic 
theologians at Nicaea in A.D. 325, at Constantinople in 
A.D. 380, and at Chalcedon in A.D. 451, reaffirming the 
statements of the so-called Apostles’ Creed with signifi- 
cant enlargement, particularly of the doctrine of Jesus 
Christ, the Son of God, and of the Church. He is the 
“only begotten of the Father, God of God, Light of 
Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made; of the 
Same essence (or substance) with the Father; by whom 
all things were made; who, for us men and for our salva- 
tion, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the 
Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.” 
This is followed by the significant statement, ‘‘And (I 
believe) one Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church,” and 


CATHOLIC SACRAMENTALISM 79 


this, again, by the statement, ‘‘I acknowledge one Bap- 
tism for the remission of sins.’’ The symbol of Chalcedon 
carefully develops the doctrine of the “‘two natures” of 
Christ, these being ‘‘inconfusedly, unchangeably, in- 
divisibly, inseparably” united, ‘“‘the property of each 
nature being preserved and concurring in one Person and 
one hypostasis (substance), not parted or divided into 
two persons, but one and the same Son and only begot- 
ten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ.” . 

It is not to be supposed that the people to whom or by 
whom these words might be repeated could put a clear 
meaning into them. It was not necessary that they should 
do so. It was only necessary that they recognize that 
the only way of salvation was through the church’s 
mysteries, beginning with Baptism. The basis of all these 
mysteries was the supreme mystery of Christ who united, 
in a way beyond our comprehension, perfect deity and 
perfect humanity in himself. He who submitted to the 
church’s mysteries partook of the grace of Christ. The 
perfect humanity of Christ was progressively imparted 
to him. He was inwardly enlightened, purified, and made 
immortal. This the holy church could certify. According- 
ly, the scriptures also were held to be a mystery whose 
inward meaning was preserved immaculate in the Church. 
All the mysteries it was her prerogative alone to minister. 
Baptism enlightens and cleanses from sin. The Eucharist 
imparts to the baptized the real flesh and blood, the 
pure human nature of Christ. Other mysteries were added 
authoritatively, as need demanded. The recipients were 
united to God in the mysterious Christ. They were 
progressively made incorruptible and at last, if they 
remained within the church, were made immortal. The 


80 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


striking words of Clement of Alexandria, uttered long 
before the creed was completed, are significant of what 
was coming: ‘‘Being baptised, we are illuminated; being 
illuminated, we become sons; we are made perfect; 
being made perfect, we are made immortal.” 

This ancient Catholic doctrine of salvation seemed . 
suited to the high mystical spirit that sought for the 
ecstasy or rapture that lifted man out of his limitations 
and made him one with the Infinite. At the same time it 
seemed to stoop to the level of the ignorant and secured 
to him the same blessing, though admittedly only by 
degrees, through mystic rites which he was required 
obediently to receive. The dogmas of the creed which 
one was required to accept were produced by a philosophy 
of religion that aimed at the vindication of the Christian 
“‘mysteries.”’ The ritual is the practical basis of the creed. 

The ancient Catholic church system is a monument of a 
progressive paganization of the Christian faith. But, on 
the other hand, the preservation of the Gospels and the 
other writings in a New Testament that was equalized in 
worth with the Old; the supreme place professedly given 
to Christ and thereby the possibility that his person- 
ality might still stand in its true dignity and worth, 
notwithstanding its obscuration through the orthodox 
interpretation of him; the thought of an inward enlight- 
ening and purifying spirit; the reiteration of human free- 
dom, and the necessity of practising morality as a condi- 
tion of receiving the benefits of the mysteries, doubtless 
operated in the creation of a character truly Christian in 
multitudes of people. The Catholic Church with its ritual 
and its creed tended to paganize Christianity. But men 
are often superior to their churches and their creeds. 





1Paedagogus 1.6 


CATHOLIC SACRAMENTALISM 81 


II, THE MEDIAEVAL (ROMAN) CATHOLIC SYSTEM 


The task of the Western church had to do, not with 
peoples who were worn down and wearied to death with a 
defunct civilization, on the one hand, and by political 
and economic oppression, on the other hand, but with the 
restless, daring, roving, battle-loving tribes of western 
Europe—Goths and Germans, Franks and Spaniards, 
Swedes and Norwegians, Danes and Anglo-Saxons, Scots 
and Welsh and Irish. They were not seeking a happy 
release from the burdens and miseries of the present life 
and an entrance into a placid immortality through the 
transmutation of human nature into the divine. For 
them life was full of zest and if they were to be saved 
from wrecking and ruining it by their imperious self- 
assertion, it could only be done by laying upon them a 
heavy hand and a restraining fear that would tame their 
fiery spirits into subjection to a higher power. So, at 
least, it seemed. 

The system of the church of the West was an almost 
inevitable consequence of the fall of the Western Empire 
before the successive assaults of the ‘‘barbarians’’ of 
central and western Europe. The “Dark Ages” followed, 
with all their confusion and turmoil. But the Church 
succeeded the Empire as the pacifier and ruler of the 
West. The Bishop of Rome, the father (pope) of the 
faithful, grasped firmly the sceptre that fell from the 
dead hand of the fallen Emperor and wielded it with a 
courage and a vigor that saved Roman civilization and 
Roman law from destruction. The story is long and thrill- 
ing and it cannot be told here. But, in theory, the Church 
was never identified with the Empire. Roman popes 
crowned monarchs of non-Roman races successors to the 


82 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


ancient Roman rulers and bound them to the Church 
whose head had signified by their coronation that they 
were heaven-appointed and their empire “‘holy,” with a 
holiness derived from the higher holiness of the Church. 
The Holy Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire 
were bound together. Each of them carried one of those 
“two swords”’ which in the hands of the Lord Christ were 
“enough.”’ In this appeal to the divine source and sanc- 
tion of the laws to be enforced by the co-operative efforts 
of the two institutions lay, perhaps, the main secret of 
success. The “custom of Rome,” that is, of the Roman 
Church, became the necessary rule of life if men were to 
be saved. Its compulsoriness was enforced by the por- 
trayal before the imagination of a sensitive but uncultured 
people of the reality of the life after death.. Not the hope 
of incorruption and immortality in God, but the desire to 
escape from being consigned for ever to the torments of 
hell after death, was the ground of the most effective 
appeal to those people. ‘‘What must I do to be saved?” 
now became, “How can I avoid the danger of going to 
hell and escape to heaven?” 

This it is that accounts for the fact that we see the 
speculative mysticism of the Greek Catholic giving place 
in the West to the practical, aggressive, militant govern- 
mentalism of the Roman Catholic. The Roman Church 
might repeat the Greek creed substantially unchanged but 
to expect the Western multitudes to enter into it sym- 
pathetically was out of the question except in the case 
of a few favored individuals. The metaphysics of the 
Kast might stand intact but in practice the Roman order 
became the efficient instrument of salvation. The Greek 
“mysteries” became Roman ‘sacraments’? (oath of 


‘The theory is expounded in Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, Ch. VII. 


CATHOLIC SACRAMENTALISM 83 


allegiance) and the Greek mystical illumination gave 
place to a compulsory obedience to an administrative 
system. The inscrutable “essence” of deity became an 
almighty despot in the sky and the mysterious Godman 
became the fear-inspiring Vicegerent of God in heaven, 
whose thunders against sinners and benedictions on 
saints were echoed by his appointed vicegerent on earth 
—the Pope speaking as head of the Church. Thus, in the 
minds of the people whom the church sought to save, 
the churchman took the place once held by the theologian, 
obedience to commands the place formerly allowed to 
heavenly enlightenment, the alternative of a heaven of 
bliss or a hell of torment the place of immortality, on 
the one hand, and corruption, on the other hand. 

The theoretical basis of the Roman system is laid in 
the work of the great monk Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. 
Living at the time when the lofty and complicated sys- 
tem of Roman government was already beginning to 
topple, he projected a theory of the meaning of the life of 
humanity in the world and of the forces that controlled 
its course that enabled the churchmen of later times to 
enforce upon the awakening conscience of western Europe 
a system of human control that appeared identical with 
the working of the divine government itself. Later think- 
ers modified his structure as the needs of their times 
seemed to require, but the main lines as laid down by the 
great architect remain still unchanged. 

His renowned Confessions and his City of God are the 
principal works to be consulted. The former presents 
his meditations upon his own inner life, the latter his 
interpretation of the course of human life in this world. 
With the aid of the Jewish and Christian scriptures and 


4 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


the church’s creed he works out a divinely predetermined 
order of events showing the successive stages of the life of 
mankind as culminating in the age of the eternal Sabbath 
about to dawn. The features of especial interest to us 
are the following: 

First and foremost, is Augustine’s deep sense of his | 
inner relation to God. A strong self-assertive personality 
himself, he must conceive God as the supreme, all-know- 
ing, all-mastering personality—not the vague Somewhat 
of a pure mysticism or the unknowable “‘Essence’”’ of the 
orthodox Trinity, but the One Definite Knowable Person 
with whom he and all other men had directly to do:! 
—‘Who can call upon thee that knoweth thee not? 
For he that knoweth thee not may call on thee as other 
than thou art.” ““What art thou to me? In thy pity teach 
me to utter it. Or what am I to thee, that thou demandest 
love from me and, if I comply not, art wroth with me and 
dost menace me with grievous woes. . . . . Hide not 
thy face from me. Let me die that I may see thy face.’’? 
The relation of the man to God is felt to be personal, 
simple, immediate, impressive, terrible. 

Directly connected with this thought of God is his 
intense conviction of the sinfulness of himself and all 
other men. Augustine was a monk and, in keeping with 
his monkish proneness to pore over the processes of his 
own soul and a morbid disesteem of the natural realm, 
he finds the natural life of men to be thoroughly evil. 
There are even times when he seems to find a morbid 
satisfaction in delineating the evil tendencies within 
himself, as if the more repugnant morally he could make 
out his nature to be, the greater must be his confidence 
that he had been delivered—the old paradox that the 
1Conf, 1:1 *Conf, 1:5 


CATHOLIC SACRAMENTALISM 85 


severer our self-judgment the greater our self-assurance. 
And so he goes to work tracing the workings of an evil 
will in himself through all the stages of his life and finds 
there a confirmation of the judgment that he (and all other 
men) are naturally hateful to God:-—‘‘Who remindeth 
me of the sin of my infancy? For in thy sight none is clear 
from sin, not even the infant whose life on earth is but a 
AAV Adie shin In the weakness of baby limbs, not in its 
will, lies its innocence. Myself have seen and known 
jealousy even in a babe.” (!!) What is true of one is true 
of all. Man’s will is universally opposed to the divine, 
man is hateful to God. 

He supports this contention by his interpretation of 
the whole course of the world. Uniting the Genesis story 
of man’s first transgression and condemnation with the 
Pauline doctrine of universal death as the fruit of uni- 
versal sin, he arrives at the conclusion that in that first 
fatal deed all men were made sinful by nature, and rightly, 
since all men were seminally in Adam. Thus he reconciles 
the doctrine of the universal badness of men with the 
doctrine of the goodness of their Creator. Sinful deeds 
are the fruit of a sinful nature and the nature itself is 
therefore condemned—the famous doctrine of Original 
Sin. 

The world being evil and God alone good, he adopts the 
life of the ascetic. Not only are the natural institutions of 
- men means for the propagation of evil but the physical 
world itself is contaminated. The man who would seek 
the perfect goodness must withdraw from the world and 
devote himself exclusively to the God who is apart from 
it::>—‘‘When I shall with my whole heart self cleave to 
thee, I shall nowhere have sorrow or labor; and my life 


1Conf. 1.7 2Conf, X. 18 


86 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


shall wholly live as wholly full of thee.’’ But how is he to 
make the change from the sinful human nature to the 
holy and divine? 

The answer is found in the Catholic view of the means 
and the method of salvation. It was through the personal 
influence of members of the Catholic Church that Au- — 
gustine experienced an inward change from unhappiness 
to blessedness. The Church then became to him the one 
divine institution created by God for the purpose of 
imparting to men the grace that saves from sin. He 
therefore bowed to its authority, submitted to its baptism! 
and accepted its creed. He felt that he owed all (instru- 
mentally) to the Church:2—‘“Indeed, I could not have 
believed the Gospel had not the authority of the Church 
constrained (commoveret) me.’”’ The authority to impart 
the grace that expels sin and purifies the soul dwells in 
the Church alone. Accordingly, the ministration of sal- 
vation becomes an act of ecclesiastical government. The 
divinely ordered career of humanity was now about to 
culminate in the great Church-State whose setting up 
marked the incoming of the kingdom of God on earth. 

To institutionalize these views of Augustine, to make 
them the theoretical basis of a system that was to be set 
up among all peoples, to subject all governments to its 
authority and save from sin and hell all who would sub- 
mit to it, was the great achievement of the Roman 
Church. Inasmuch as the celibate priesthood became the 

Wi ruling officials of the church, submission to the hierarchy 
became the prime con ation of salvation. Thus, to the 
rude untutored peoples of the West, the Church became 
the one authority competent to declare the conditions 
on which hung the issues of eternal life and death. The 


1Conf, IX. 2 2Ep. c. Manich. 5 


CATHOLIC SACRAMENTALISM 87 


Catholic traditions, including the scriptures, the creed, 
the liturgy and the moral legislation, were all clothed with 
a halo of sanctity. All were from God. Obedience, rather 
than enlightenment, became the one supreme requisite 
in those who would be saved. To disobey any of the 
Church’s laws was to fall under the wrath of God. Thus 
the priest became ruler as well as hierophant. He was 
separated from, and superior to, the layman. The secular 
state became tributary to the holy church. The priest- 
hood became an organized hierarchy with the Bishop of 
Rome at their head. The sacraments that ministered 
salvation became the effective instruments of a sacred 
system of government with God at its head in heaven 
and the Pope of Rome, vicegerent of God, at its head on 
earth. Such was the ecclesiastical system that developed 
out of Augustinianism. Augustine’s personal God had 
become a far-off Despot. 

When the Western Church took over as its inheritance 
the Eastern Church’s view of the antithesis of human 
nature to the divine, of matter to spirit, of the earthly 
to the heavenly, it made the way of salvation, as far as 
concerns man’s part in it, the practice of asceticism— 
renunciation of self, natural goods and the present world. 
The ascetic became the truly typical Christian. The 
monks and nuns, having renounced everything, stood 
in the front rank. The clergy were monasticised. The 
people must follow the clergy as far as was practicable. 
But not fully, for then the human race would come to an 
end. But their defect could be remedied through submis- 
sion to the priest and then the merits that were deposited 
in the church could be mediated to them through the 
sacraments in priestly hands. Accordingly, as we have 


88 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


said, obedience, that is, submission of intellect and will, 
became the indispensable means of salvation on the side 
of the recipient. The administration of the sacraments by 
the church became the indispensable means on the divine 
side. At length the Pope, Boniface VIII, raised to the 
pinnacle of power, declares in the bull, Unam Sanctam - 
(A.D. 1302), ‘‘We, moreover, declare, proclaim, and pro- 
nounce that it is altogether necessary to salvation for 
every human being to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.’’ 

Salvation became a matter of governmental adminis- 
tration. Sin became crime, violation of the will of the 
Almighty Monarch. His will is absolute, his laws inexor- 
able, and retribution is sure and unerring. The guilt of 
transgression against such a Being is infinite and the 
punishment everlasting. All men are hopelessly doomed 
unless God himself intervene on man’s behalf. This is 
grace. Sin is of man, grace is of God. Sin is propagated 
through natural channels, grace through the supernatur- 
al. The order of sinful nature is superseded by the order 
of grace. Its fountain-head is the Godman, Jesus Christ. 
By assuming our nature, without sin, from a virgin and 
by suffering in it the full due of human demerit he has 
acquired for human benefit infinite merit. Of this the 
Church is the divinely chosen depository. Her miraculous 
powers and her orthodoxy attest her exclusive right to 
minister the saving sacraments. These were now duly 
framed into a system, all the sacraments being necessary 
to salvation but not all of them (e. g., not orders) neces- 
sary for all persons. 

Baptism washes away the guilt of original sin but does 
not uproot the concupiscence that prompts the sinning. 
In Confirmation the initiate accepts his place in the church 


CATHOLIC SACRAMENTALISM 89 


and responsibility for his post-baptismal sins. In the 
Eucharist, the chief sacrament, Christ himself, very God 
and very man, is the real substance of the bread and wine, 
and his body and blood are really partaken of by the 
recipient. Christ is offered to God as the sacrifice for sins 
on behalf of both the living and the dead when he is 
lifted up in the hands of the priest. Confession by the 
penitent, on behalf of himself and others, followed by 
priestly absolution, precedes the observance of the Euchar- 
ist. In this way the door of salvation is kept open for all 
the baptized until the Judgment Day. The sacrament of 
Penance with “‘satisfaction’’ for misdeeds, Extreme 
Unction for the dying, Marriage for those who enter 
wedlock, and Orders for the consecration of priests to their 
holy office, complete the necessary provision for all the 
spiritual needs of men. According to the theory the divine 
_ scheme of salvation from sin and the Roman system of 
church government are inseparably united. 

Comment: The story of the transition from the type of 
life in the Eastern Church to the Western type is in part 
the story of human betterment. For, notwithstanding the 
repulsiveness of the Roman system from the moral and 
religious point of view, there are certain marks of its 
superiority to the Eastern Church. There is a higher 
estimate of the present world and of life in it. Its prepara- 
tory relation to a world to come gives it an eternal sig- 
nificance. If divine nature and human nature are still 
viewed as mutually exclusive, nevertheless, the responsi- 
bility of the human person to the divine really brings the 
human into the sphere of the divine. Moreover, the whole 
life of man, individual and social, is brought under the 
sway of an inviolable law. This prepared the way for the 


90 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


recognition of the moral law as immanent in human ac- 
tion. Finally, the increasing emphasis on the crucifixion 
of Jesus as significant of the redemptive power of the 
vicarious life in whomsoever found, the transfer of the 
emphasis on incarnation to an emphasis on atonement, 
from a metaphysical transmutation to the righting of an 
infinite wrong—all this tended to bring to the mind of 
the Christian people the consciousness of an all-absorbing 
task, rather than a subsidence into a condition of rest, 
as the true goal of life. 


CHAPTER V 
PROTESTANT ASSURANCE 


The Roman Church sought to establish a system of 
law and order in Western Europe and partly succeeded. 
Salvation, she taught, came by the setting up of an effi- 
cient mode of government. That government was her 
own, transplanted into other lands. It was supposed to 
be of divine origin. The sacraments she ministered con- 
veyed to men the divine grace that saved them. The 
sacraments were guarded by her discipline. Through her 
penitential system she sought to produce in men an 
acute sense of sin and a fear of its terrible penalties. The 
theoretical support of these claims and practices was 
found in such doctrines as the Fall of Man, Original Sin, 
Guilt, Atonement, Absolution. But mightiest of all in 
their influence on the popular feeling were the pictures 
of a present and future purgatory, where the baptized 
expiated and were purged from their post-baptismal sins, 
a final Judgment Day, an endless Hell for the unbaptized 
and finally impenitent, and a Heaven of bliss for the 
finally pure. Like the Jewish Church, the Roman Church 
dramatized the process of damnation and salvation. The 
figures and scenes of the drama were commonly taken 
to correspond to solid facts supernaturally communicated. 

It is one thing, however, to arouse the human con- 
science and quite another thing to meet its demands. 
Rome failed to placate the feeling of guilt and the terror 
of hell in the hearts of the more serious-minded people, 


91 


92 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


and more especially so as learning spread and men began 
to read and muse over the New Testament without the 
directing aid of priest or clerk. For many, the sense of 
guilt was a heavier burden than the fear of hell, though 
the latter too was mostly very real to them. Moreover, 
the church’s moral corruptions offended them and they ~ 
began inquiring for a way of deliverance from guilt that 
was not dependent on the priests and the sacraments of 
the church. The importunate question of the Philippian 
jailer was reechoed by multitudes in the later mediaeval 
times with an earnestness and passion hitherto unparal- 
leled. In this cry and the renewed response to it the inner 
soul of Protestantism found utterance. Paramount amid 
the fierce and bitter struggles of the Reformation—hal- 
lowed in our memories—was the question of the way of 
salvation from sin and hell. 

The Protestants took over without serious question 
the great body of Catholic doctrines as divinely revealed 
but made a distinction between the revealed doctrines 
and the church’s pretensions. It was the matter of 
practice that mainly stirred them to action. Catholic 
doctrines were revised only in so far as the practical 
(in the deepest sense) needs demanded. Men who, 
throughout their whole life, were kept in uncertainty 
with respect to their relation to God and their personal 
destiny could not live in blessedness and peace. For the 
Roman Church brought them only into ‘‘the way to 
salvation” and then made its ultimate realization de- 
pendent on their continued obedience to her divine com- 
mands. They were always possibly to be saved but never 
saved. Assurance was wanting. The certainty of having 
found the truth could alone supply it. And thus it came 


PROTESTANT ASSURANCE 93 


about in the end that, while Catholics relied on cere- 
mony, Protestants rested on doctrine, or the knowledge 
of the truth. What, then, amid all the variant expressions 
of Protestant belief, was its central doctrine? 


I. THE GENERAL FRAMEWORK OF PROTESTANT DOCTRINE 
IS BUILT AROUND THE IDEA OF SALVATION. THAT 
DOCTRINE IS AT BOTTOM A THEORY OF THE 
DIVINE GOVERNMENT OF THE WORLD, THAT 
IS, THE ROMAN CATHOLIC VIEW 
REFORMED 


1. God is the All-knowing, Almighty Maker of the 
world. This is the ultimate and sufficient answer to all 
human questioning about the universe. Being its Maker, 
he is also its Ruler, a ruler with absolute rights as against 
his creatures and no duties toward them. Among them 
is Man, endowed with those intellectual and moral 
capacities that render him capable of receiving intelli- 
gently a communication of the thought and will of God 
—that is, if God choose to give it. That, it is affirmed, 
he has done. The Monarch of the Universe, the one Su- 
preme Autocratic King, has of his own will and for his 
own glory—no higher aim possible—made known to man 
a holy, inviolable Law. By obedience to this law man was 
to receive the reward of eternal blessedness, by diso- 
bedience the penalty of eternal misery. Man is wholly 
in the hands of God. He is wholly a subject of the divine 
law. All rights are God’s. All duties—no rights—are 
man’s. This is the basic orthodox Protestant view of the 
relation of God and Man. 

That this is all true is said to be declared by the ra- 
tional human understanding as it apprehends the nature 


94 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


of the world, of Man and, thereby, of God. This natural, 
rational knowledge is confirmed by the supernatural, 
super-rational knowledge which God has been pleased, 
of his own sovereign will, to give to certain chosen per- 
sons through miraculous revelation. The revelation in 
its beginnings was given with the beginning of the race, . 
was progressively unfolded through successive ages and 
was finally completed by the personal coming of Jesus 
Christ to the world and by the subsequent gift of his 
Holy Spirit of truth to his first messengers. It is now com- 
mitted to writing in the Old and New Testaments. 
These present to us the one, holy, inspired declaration of 
the will and purpose of God. In them the character and 
method of the divine government of men and the world 
are set forth clearly, so that every one may be able to 
know them for himself. These scriptures are the statutes 
of Heaven. 

This supernatural revelation confirms, purifies and 
completes that natural knowledge of God’s will toward 
man and of man’s subjection to it, which is contained 
in his moral consciousness. But the revelation does vastly 
more, because in the course of time a deeper need of 
man’s arose. The revelation gives also, on the one hand, 
the knowledge of the true cause of the present and future 
miseries of men and, on the other hand, the further 
knowledge of the provision which God, the All-seeing, 
had made from all eternity for the deliverance of a por- 
tion of the human race from the consequences of their 
misdeeds. 

Hereby we have learned that the first human pair, in 
spite of a plain declaration of the divine law, set their 
will against the will of their Creator and were sentenced 


PROTESTANT ASSURANCE 95 


to death temporal and eternal as a penalty. But, in order 
to bestow on man an unmerited blessing, God communi- 
cated a knowledge of the means He would take to bring 
this purposed good to men. Here was the beginning of a 
two-fold revelation—of law and its penalties, of grace 
and its rewards; that is, a revelation of the nature and 
consequences of sin and a revelation of the nature and 
consequences of salvation. Sin is criminality, for it is 
a violation of law. The divine favor is forfeited and the 
sinner is left to himself, helpless and lost. The penalty is 
positive, not merely negative. All human suffering and 
death are sent in execution of the divine sentence. 
Moreover, the first sin is decreed by the divine will to be 
charged upon the whole natural posterity of the first 
parents in the double form of an inherited inner corrup- 
tion of their nature, which was originally pure, and of 
imputed guilt. Human nature, universally, is therefore 
fallen, corrupt, depraved, evil and condemned. Left to 
themselves men sink lower and lower in sin and can never 
escape the penalty by any means in their power. The 
guilt and ill-desert of their crime are to be computed in 
terms of the dignity of him against whom they sinned— 
it is infinite. Hence the merited punishment is infinite. 
It can never be expiated by a finite being. The sin and 
the suffering are both eternal in duration. Thus far, of 
the negative side of the Protestant doctrine of salvation. 
We turn now to the positive side. 

2. The divine government is an administration of justice 
according to the ill-desert of the criminal but zt is also an 
administration of mercy, so far, at least, as mercy is to be 
exercised. ““God must be just, he may be merciful.” 
By the power and right of his irresistible will God eter- 


96 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


nally decrees whatever comes to pass. As he, by the 
exercise of his divine prerogative, decreed that every 
violation of his unchangeable and irrevocable law must 
be expiated by a penalty commensurate with the infinite 
guiltiness of the sin, so also by the right and power of his 
free sovereign will he has decreed that another should | 
make the infinite expiation on man’s behalf and in his 
stead. Such an act of God’s, we repeat, is an act purely of 
mercy—for even if one might contend that man in his 
state of purity had claims on the divine favor, that 
(supposed) right had been forfeited by sin. 

But this act of mercy must not be exercised in a way 
that would violate the principle of justice. That would 
be to make God a violator of the very law he had com- 
manded man to keep. The penalty must be executed to 
the full. Behold, then, the divine mercy! God himself, 
the offended lawgiver and stern Judge, has provided a 
substitute for guilty man. That substitute is himself God 
—Divine, the Son of God, co-eternal and co-equal with 
Himself. By his own free act and in obedience to his 
Father’s will the substitute assumes human nature to 
himself, uniting it to the divine nature in his own single 
person. Hereby he is made competent, as man, to bear 
man’s penalty, being himself sinless and deserving no 
penalty of his own; and, as God, he is competent to 
bear it to the full and to expiate the guilt. Luther said,! 
“There is no room for mercy and grace to work over us 
and in us or to help us to eternal blessings and to salva- 
tion, unless enough has been done to satisfy righteous- 
ness perfectly.”?’ And Calvin said,? ‘It is of great import- 
ance to our interests that he who was to be our mediator 
should be both true God and man. .... It was such a 


*See McGiffort, Protestant ?TInstitutes II, Ch. XIII. 1, 
ie sal Since Kant, page 2.3 


PROTESTANT ASSURANCE 97 


necessity as arose from the heavenly decree on which 
the salvation of men depended. . . . . The most merciful 
God, when he determined on our redemption, became 
himself our Redeemer in the person of his only-begotten 
Son. . . . . Our Lord made his appearance as a real 
man, to act as his (man’s) substitute in his obedience to 
the Father, to lay down his flesh as the price of satisfac- 
tion to God’s justice and to suffer the punishment we 
had deserved in the same nature in which the offence has 
been committed.” This, then, is the ‘‘plan of salvation”’ 
as ordered by high heaven from all eternity, man being 
in no sense a partner in it or aware of it until after he 
had sinned. No contingencies could possibly obviate the 
execution of this plan. The plan and the execution of it 
are alike wholly in the hand of God. 

The concrete execution of the plan occurred at a 
definitely predetermined date and in a definitely pre- 
scribed manner. At the fixed date the Son of God made 
his personal advent into the world as the physical son of a 
virgin. His nature was pure and sinless. The actual per- 
sonal (physical and spiritual) penalties to which man 
was sentenced were now imposed and really executed 
upon him. In his sufferings on the cross Jesus was truly 
enduring in his own person the wrath of God and at that 
definite time made a true and perfect atonement for 
human sin. Hear Calvin again: ‘‘Now, because our guilt 
rendered us liable to a curse at the heavenly tribunal of 
God, the condemnation of Christ before Pontius Pilate, 
Governor of Judea, is stated, in the first place, that we 
may know that in this righteous person was inflicted the 
punishment that belonged to us. We could not escape the 
terrible judgment of God; to deliver us from it Christ 
1Inst. II, XVI. 3 


98 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


submitted to be condemned even before a wicked and 
profane mortal. Had he been assassinated by robbers or 
murdered in a popular tumult, in such a death there 
would have been no appearance of satisfaction. But when 
he is placed as a criminal before the tribunal—when he is 
accused and overpowered by the testimony of witnesses 
and by the mouth of the judge is condemned to die— 
we understand from these circumstances that he sus- 
tained the character of a sinner and a malefactor. ... . 
at the same time that he was loaded with the guilt of 
others, but had none of hisown. .... This is our abso- 
lution, that the guilt which made us obnoxious to pun- 
ishment is transferred to the person of the Son of God. . . 
For we ought particularly to remember this satisfaction, 
that we may not spend our whole lives in terror and 
anxiety, as though we were pursued by the righteous 
vengeance of God, which the Son of God had transferred 
to himself.” Calvin goes on to say: ‘‘Moreover, the species 
of death which he suffered is fraught with a peculiar 
mystery. The cross was accursed, not only by the judg- 
ment of men but by the decree of the divine law. There- 
fore, when Christ is lifted up upon it he renders himself 
obnoxious to the curse. . . . (His suffering was spiritual 
as well as physical). If Christ had died a merely corporeal 
death no end would have been accomplished by it; it was 
requisite that he should feel the severity of the divine 
vengeance in order to appease the wrath of God and 
satisfy his justice.” It is evident that the Protestant 
orthodox theory of salvation was at bottom the Roman 
Catholic theory more completely and consistently round- 
ed out and purged of its churchism. 


PROTESTANT ASSURANCE 99 


3. Undoubtedly the orthodox Protestant theologians were 
quite unconscious of the fact that they had arbitrarily met- 
amor phosed the whole personal career of Jesus into a theatri- 
cal dramatization of their own legalistic jurisprudence. 
The artificiality and unreality of the supposed procedure 
of a heavenly court whose forms are acted out on earth is 
manifest at a glance to one who finds the meaning of 
human history immanent in human actions. We need not 
wonder that a modern Calvinist, in his attempt to cling 
to the older view has sought to remove the stumbling- 
block by making of the actual historic events merely a 
manifestation of the judgment and of the execution of 
penalty that transpired in the heavenly realm. Why 
make of the acts of bad men who were filled with the 
spirit of the rankest injustice an exhibition of divine 
justice? 

We must remember that the foregoing scheme of sal- 
vation was not viewed as a scheme on paper but as fact, 
fact definitely ordered and definitely announced before 
the actual events took place and more definitely and 
completely declared after the occurrence. The whole was 
regarded as actually accomplished at the time and place 
appointed and the predestined outcome was believed to 
be certain of fulfilment in time and eternity, in this 
world and in the world to come. The Christian Gospel 
was a divine announcement of the facts for the benefit of 
the hearers. Here was the ground of assurance that was 
then offered to the anxious seeking soul. 

The nations of western Europe had long groaned under 
the corrupt and oppressive government set up by the 
Roman Church. The Protestant Reformation was, on 
one side of it, a revolution against that government. 


100 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


The doctrinal support of the revolution was found in a 
theory of a divine system that made the hated Roman 
rule an anomaly and a violation of the government of 
heaven. Protestants believed in this government and felt 
that they were placing themselves under its authority 
and protection. Consequently, when they believed it to 
be exercised in their behalf, they feared nothing here 
or hereafter. 

There are elements of great value in the Protestant 
conception of government and of the necessity of every 
purpose of human betterment conforming to the laws 
that operate in the government of mankind. The view 
that heaven and earth, time and eternity, God and man 
are inwardly related and that one supreme purpose runs 
through all the ages and all existences, it is an unutter- 
ably grand achievement of the human mind to have 
reached. But the character of that law, the purpose that 
constitutes it, the manner of its operation and the rela- 
tion of the forms and institutions that arise in history 
to it must be interpreted far differently, or there is no 
ministry of salvation to be found in it. To us of the 
present day, who have become aware of the relatively 
small part that institutions of government—legislatures, 
statutes, administrations, courts of justice, execution of 
sentences, and such like—play in the actual making and 
moulding of the lives of the people, the Reformation 
scheme of salvation seems very alien to the character of 
the forces that actually make for human good or ill. 
All “government”’ reposes on the inner character of the 
people governed and on the manner in which their minds 
regard one another and the world around them. After 
all, the government of any people is identical with the 


PROTESTANT ASSURANCE 101 


way those people live. One can be called their governor 
in so far as the character of his personality penetrates 
theirs and imparts itself to them. Saviour and Governor 
are always one and the same personality. 

The Reformation doctrine of salvation was, then, a 
development and a correction of the Roman Catholic 
view of the saving act as at bottom a process of criminal 
law. The forms and means of enforcement are viewed as 
external to the life of the criminal. The majesty of the 
law and the rights of the lawgiver are fully vindicated. 
This, and not the realization of the worth of all the per- 
sons concerned, including the criminal himself, is made 
the governing interest of the entire scheme. This is its 
first fatal defect. 


4. The manner in which we view this scheme today 
rises out of the plain fact that Protestantism has at length 
outlived it. The view of the administration of justice 
and the character of the government on which it is sup- 
posed to repose do not correspond to the demands of the 
truly moral life. We have found that actual conformity 
with it would prove destructive to’'our most precious 
interests. Governments and courts are for men and not 
men for courts and governments. Not in the formal pro- 
ceedings of a criminal court but in the loves and caresses, 
the sympathies and mutual ministries, the forbearances 
and patience, the vicariousness and undying confidence 
on the part of each and all of us in relation to one another 
in the life of the family and of the home, do we discover 
the richest clue to the character of the relations between 
God and men. In comparison with such a life lived by men 
in common how artificial do the inherited forms of court 
proceedings often appear! How often it has turned out 


102 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


that true justice is best meted out when these forms are 
left in abeyance! For righteousness and love, justice and 
mercy, are not opposed to each other but in their ultimate 
meaning are one. 

But in this, our adverse, criticism of the orthodox 
Protestant ‘‘plan of salvation’? we should do less than 
justice to our theological forebears were we to fail to 
look beyond these theoretical representations to the 
moral and religious realities that their doctrine, in part, 
revealed but, in part, concealed from view. Let us ferret 
out the profound convictions that sought expression 
but found it only in perverted form in their theories. 
We shall find these suggested in that part of their theory 
which relates to the application of the work of salvation 
to the individual. 


II. THE TRUE SALVATION OF THE PROTESTANT LAY IN 
HIS NEW AWARENESS OF A HIGHER AND MORE 
BLESSED RELATION TO GOD THAN 
CATHOLICISM COULD REVEAL 


The spirit that constituted the Protestant religious 
reformation, as we have intimated, was as truly con- 
cealed as it was revealed in the abstract scheme of gov- 
ernment in which it was clothed. Why did the Protestant 
mind turn hopefully to any such doctrine as we have set 
forth? The answer is at hand and it is plain and simple. 
It was because the Protestant had entered into an assur- 
‘ance of blessedness in the very presence of a holy God 
and he sought to justify this feeling of assurance to his 
reason. The Protestant doctrine was an apology for the 
Protestant faith. The great question that pressed for 
solution was this: How can a man be justified in cherish- 


PROTESTANT ASSURANCE 103 


ing this assurance? What ground can there possibly be 
for it, in view of the deep consciousness of sin and ill- 
desert which a man must always feel as he thinks of the 
God who is all-holy? And the answer was, as we have 
seen: Sin is to be viewed as a crime; crime can be expiated 
only by punishment; when once the punishment has been 
inflicted, it cannot be repeated, the criminality is re- 
moved, the sufferer is no longer guilty, he is now as truly 
justified before the law as if he had never broken the law; 
knowing this, the at-one-time criminal can and ought to 
be at peace; justice itself commands him to be at peace. 
So far, then, as regards the reason that was offered for 
the Protestant sense of blessedness. 

But, after all, this was a very precarious footing for 
the assurance of personal blessedness. For the assurance 
was threatened very seriously the moment one became 
uncertain whether he was one of those whose personal — 
guilt had actually been annulled. The doctrine of the | 
unconditional divine election and predestination of cer- | 
tain persons to the final blessedness of heaven was offered 
as a guarantee to the doubting ones that their salvation 
was absolutely secured. But it left them still hanging in 
agonizing suspense, inasmuch as it was also held that 
there were some men who were non-elect and destined to 
the endless hell of the wicked. Every one was forced to 
ask the further question, ‘‘Am I one of the elect? How 
can I know it? How can I know that the salvation so 
amply provided has been or will continue to be applied 
to me?” The crucial test of any doctrine of salvation 
always lies in the application of it to the particular 


104 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


individual who is concerned to ask for it. The Protestant 
thinkers had an answer which was supposed to meet the 
need. We turn to it. 

It was said that while the ground of salvation lay in the 
substitutionary atonement by Christ, thereby making it 
possible for a just God to set the sinner free, the actual 
bestowment of salvation upon the individual occurred in 
a two-fold manner. First, he was justified, that is, re- 
stored to a perfect legal standing before God, the Judge. 

Secondly, the pure and holy nature of the Redeemer was 
imparted to the individual, the process beginning in his 
regeneration and being completed in his sanctification, 
the holy state which is to be his perfectly at death. The 
former of these received the main emphasis in early 
Protestant times because it enabled men to set aside the 
complicated Catholic scheme of gradual and uncertain 
justification, with all its compromises. But in due course 
of time the latter of these two steps in salvation became 
practically the more important because it was truer than 
the other to the Protestant genius. For it drew attention 
emphatically to the significance of the inner conscious 
life of the human spirit. 

By what means was this two-fold benefit bestowed on 
the individual? The simple, straightforward answer was: 
Through his personal faith.1 How greatly the traditional 
Roman way of salvation was simplified; how easily also 
its whole complicated structure of church-works that 
were to be, in their own measure, procurative of salvation, 
was cast into the discard by this plain statement! But, 
one might object: “After all, does not this make of faith 
itself a work that merits salvation as its own fitting 
reward? If so, then you have only substituted an inner 


‘This answer was partly nullified by the Protestants who retained the superstitious 
view of sacraments as imparting salvation. 


PROTESTANT ASSURANCE 105 


good work for an outer.’”’ The Protestant answer was: 
“Not so, inasmuch as this very faith is itself the gift 
of God, a gift secured by Christ’s meritorious death and 
imparted to the individual by the action of the divine 
Spirit on his mind and heart. The faith is a part of the 
process of inward renewal. It is the first stage of the 
operation of the indwelling Spirit as he gives to men his 
secret testimony of the favor of God upon the individual.” 

Very naturally, therefore, the early Protestant made 
much of this faith, at the very same time that he held 
that God might have taken some other means of convey- 
ing salvation, had He chosen to do so. Faith was no mere 
intellectual belief or assent to the truth but a warm, 
living, personal confidence in God. Says Luther: “It is 
clear that to a Christian man his faith suffices for every- 
thing and that he has no need of works for justification.” 
“Not that I am acceptable to God on account of the 
worthiness of my faith,” says the Heidelberg Catechism.? 
“We believe that, to attain the true knowledge of this 
great mystery, the Holy Ghost kindleth in our hearts an 
upright faith,” says the Belgic Confession;? “which em- 
braceth Jesus Christ with all his merits, appropriates him 
and seeks nothing more besides him.”’ Calvin‘ exalts the 
worth of faith by saying, ‘‘Faith consists not in ignorance, 
but knowledge, and that not only of God but also of the 
divine will. .... Faith consists in a knowledge of God 
and of Christ.’’ But he is careful not to put personal faith 
on a level with the revelation given in the scriptures: 
“Faith has an important relation to the word and can 
no more be separated from it than the rays from the sun 


whence they proceed. .... Now, we shall have a com- 
plete definition of faith if we say that it is a steady and 
‘1Primary Works—Wace and 2Question 61 4Inst. III Ch. I, 2 ff 


Buchheim page 262. 3Article XXII 


106 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


certain knowledge of the divine benevolence toward us, 
which, being founded on the truth of the gratuitous 
promise in Christ, is both revealed to our minds and 
confirmed to our hearts by the Holy Spirit.’? Calvin 
recognized the deep experimental, emotional side of faith 
and he had a care not to allow it to be lost sight of. Hence 
he distinguishes it from any merely intellectual process: 
“The assent which we give to the divine word is from 
the heart rather than the head and from the affections 
rather than the understanding. . . . Christ cannot be 
known without the sanctification of the Spirit. Conse- 
quently, faith is absolutely inseparable from a pious 
affection.’’ He insists! on the experience of an inner‘‘ secret 
testimony” given by the Spirit to the believer. Accord- 
ingly, the knowledge of faith ‘“‘consists more in certainty 
than in comprehension.’’ Not even the holy scriptures 
have authority independently of this secret witness: 
“Nothing is effected by the word without the illumina- 
tion of the Holy Spirit. Whence it appears that faith is 
far superior to human intelligence. Nor is it enough for the 
mind to be illuminated by the Spirit of God, unless the 
heart also be strengthened and supported by his power.”’ 
There is a? ‘‘secret energy of the Spirit by which we are 
introduced to the enjoyment of Christ and all his bene- 
fits.’ Faith, to Calvin, was not a merely receptive or 
passive attitude but embraced intellectual, moral and 
emotional qualities. Indeed it becomes the living force in 
the soul by which the soul is united with God—a satis- 
factory substitute for the Catholic sacraments. It is the 
misfortune of Protestantism that political, economic and 
ecclesiastical interests crowded to the front, absorbed 
the attention of thinkers, and left the deepening of this 


1Loc. cit. 14, 33 AInste TIROGnal 


PROTESTANT ASSURANCE 107 


profound experience to the freer Protestant bodies, 
such as Baptists, Quakers, Pietists, and to an older body, 
the Moravians. This inner consciousness of participation 
in the higher life, the life divine, was the truly liberating 
force in Protestantism. When it sprang up at last in the 
Methodist revival with unquenchable force it quickly 
made its way out into the modern world and has become 
the mainstay of the heart of Protestant Christianity. 

Here, then, we see that which was of far profounder 
significance for Protestantism than its theory of govern- 
ment. The Protestant assurance was not at bottom an 
inference from an authoritatively proclaimed govern- 
mental order and process but such an insight into the 
life within and the world without as makes one aware 
that he is constantly in immediate relation with God, 
that this relation comes as a gift from the higher world. 
This it was that gave to the career of Jesus Christ and 
to the ancient Christian scriptures their true meaning. 
This inner relation is the secret of the man who grasps it, 
and it becomes in each participant in it the power that 
enables him to rise above his former self and reach ever 
out to the better, the holier, the divine. 

When we turn from the richness of this inner life and 
its fruitage in moral betterment in the lives of men in all 
lands to the formal doctrines of Protestant Confessions, 
we perceive that the Protestant intellect, fashioned as it 
was by the Catholic authoritarian methods of exposition 


current in those times, fell far short of doing justice to}! 


oes 


the Protestant heart with its unquenchable conscious-} | 


ness of living unity with God, a love for God inseparably 
united with efforts to save and bless erring men. Th 


108 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


intelligence, the conscience of the modern Christian must 
remain unsatisfied until it reaches a better interpretation. 


Ill. THE BASIS OF THIS BETTER INTERPRETATION OF 
THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE OF SALVATION WE FIND 
WITHIN THE PROTESTANT MOVEMENT THE 
MOMENT WE TURN OUR ATTENTION AWAY 
FROM ITS FORMS OF DOCTRINE TO THE 
QUALITY OF THE LIFE WHICH 
THOSE DOCTRINES WERE 
INTENDED TO 
PRESERVE 


In Protestantism there is an outreach of the human 
spirit to attain to the fuller life of man that goes beyond 
its earlier efforts. The character of this human outreach 
we shall seek to set forth more fully in subsequent chap- 
ters. In the present we shall be content to mention some 
of the affirmations of Protestantism that point to it, 
affirmations which were particularly offensive to Cath- 
olicism. As Schleiermacher pointed out long ago, the 
point of the Catholic attack indicates in each case the 
line of the Protestant advance. 

1. The head and front of the Protestant offending was 
its seeming secularization of the sacred, its profaning of 
the holy, its reduction of the heavenly to the earthly and 
of the divine to the human. There appeared an uprising 
of the secular political order against the rights of Holy 
Church. The church’s yoke was broken from the neck 
of the state and its divine authority seemingly usurped 
when the state rallied the people to its own support in 
the rebellion against the church. It even went so far as 
to nationalize the church as it existed within the bound- 


PROTESTANT ASSURANCE 109 


aries of each Protestant state, and to bring it under state 
control—a policy directly opposed to the great mediaeval 
system in which the Holy Catholic Church had united 
to itself the Holy Roman Empire as its ally and subordin- 
ate. This happened in England, Scotland, Holland, 
Scandinavia, many parts of the German Empire, 
and at one time threatened to become general. How 
horrifying it must have been to the minds of all to whom 
the church seemed the Divine Mother of all the saints, 
to witness the activities of the secular potentates dis- 
placing ecclesiastical officials from their high places 
assigned to them by divine authority, and justifying 
this wanton invasion of the church’s realm by affirming 
the divine right of kings and princes, as against the divine 
rights of popes, and the divine rights of the common 
layman, as against the divine rights of the priesthood! 
2. Associated with this offense against the sacred 
institution was the appropriation of the church’s revenues 
to common purposes, whether personal or political. 
That is to say, the Catholic saw that the economic inter- 
est played a powerful part in the Protestant movement 
and he condemned it for that reason. For the every-day 
affairs of common life and of common people were being 
treated as of more account than the heavenly ministra- 
tion of the saving sacraments. Protestantism seemed but 
common worldliness masquerading under the name of 
religion in order to attach a sacred character to its ill- 
gotten gains. The reduction of the number of the sacra- 
ments from seven to two, and the doubt thrown on the 
efficacy even of these to save, followed by the open repud- 
iation by Protestant Dissenters of the whole doctrine of 
sacramental efficacy, confirmed the Catholic contention 


110 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


that Protestantism was in principle antisacramental and 
only clung to the two sacraments because it shrank from 
the consequences that might ensue from a thorough- 
going consistency. That is to say, Catholicism saw in 
Protestantism a renunciation, in principle, of faith in 
the communication of supernatural blessings to man- 
kind. One had a right to expect in due time a distinct 
repudiation of the doctrine of the divine incarnation, of 
the divine revelation and of the divine institution of 
salvation to men. Thus the entire life and career of man- 
kind would be made to repose on a purely natural founda- 
tion. Therefore marriage would take rank higher than 
celibacy, the family higher than the church, physical 
parentage higher than the fatherhood of the -priest, and 
the pursuit of natural goods take precedence of that life 
of renunciation which was the Catholic Church’s ideal. 
And, to the eye of the Catholic observer, this too came to 
pass in due time. 

Might not the consequences of the success of Protest- 
antism be of the direst kind? Might not the thoughts of 
men turn from heaven to earth, from the high world- 
forgetful contemplation of the divine to the understand- 
ing of the purely human? Might not the exploratory 
genius of man take precedence of the spirit of devotion, 
shake off the restraint of authority and leave no mystery 
unattacked by the human intellect, no sacred enclosure 
safe from profanation by human feet? Might not the 
formulas of science displace the liturgies of the church 
and the pursuit of the goods of nature or reverence for 
nature take the place of the worship of God? Seemingly, 
it was to avert these direful consequences and save true 
religion from its foes that Giordano Bruno was burnt for 


PROTESTANT ASSURANCE 111 


his free speculations, Galileo was forced to recant and 
Protestant martyrs perished by the hundred in the fire. 
Were the Catholics the true interpreters of Protest- 
antism or were the early Protestant Confessions of faith 
its true interpretations? Might not the Protestant faith 
turn out to be a profounder and richer faith than either 
the Protestants or the Catholics of those days were able 
to understand? Might not the Protestant repudiation of 
the Catholic system be the outcome of a deeper religious 
life than the Catholic, an experience that could no more 
be nurtured by the Catholic system than a full-grown 
man can be-nourished on the diet of a youth? If it be 
true, as we have said, that the idea of salvation is basic 
to the whole body of religious thought, then the answer 
to the above questions must commence with a restate- 
ment of the approach to this fundamental conception. 


CHAPTER VI 
THE MODERN PROTESTANT POINT OF VIEW 


The theories of salvation which we have briefly 
reviewed were erected largely on the basis of a belief 
that a body of valid information had been given to men 
concerning the relation between God and men, God’s 
purpose in reference to them, the verdict he had pro- 
nounced upon their ways and their character, and the 
provision he had made for their good. Many people still 
feel that if there be no such valid information available 
we can have no reliable doctrine of salvation here and no 
clear assurance of a better life and a better state, or a 
worse life and a worse state, yet to come. However that 
may be, we must make up our minds quietly to face the 
realities and adjust ourselves to them. 

Of some things we all are sure—we are ever certain 
that there is a future for us, we are ever peering into it 
with the aim of discovering its secret; it has for us a dual 
character, being bad or good, and there is in us a power 
‘of adjustment. The issues of life seem to us to be adjusted 
from within. We exercise the power of self-direction. 
This, at any rate, is our universal human faith that 
comes to light in the Protestant self-affirmation. We are 
not weary of the world. We are not afraid to live. We 
do not face the future with shrinking. We admire the 
young child when it challenges the future and plunges 
without fear into the great shadows of the forest of life. 
We bow in loyalty before the heroes who spring into the 


112 


THE MODERN PROTESTANT POINT OF VIEW 113 


battle with dauntless courage. For we feel that such men 
and such children are only true to themselves and to us. 
We would not have it ordered otherwise than it is now. 
We would not have it, if we could, that every one of us 
should have the information requisite to secure us in 
advance against all danger, with the consequent loss of 
the yearning to accomplish the thing that seems for- 
bidden to us. This very uncertainty it is that gives the 
tang to life. That alone could be salvation which, so far 
from sparing us the task of working out our destiny, 
magnifies the imperative that we do so and quickens our 
powers in anticipation of the struggle. This is the soul 
of a modern Protestantism. 

The experiences of life and the processes of reflection 
by which through a period of four centuries we have 
reached this position are not to be traced in this essay, 
but a dispassionate estimate of the religious life of the 
Protestantism of these times will make it plain, I think, 
that while we are still the heirs to much of the best that 
was to be found in the Protestantism of the Reformation, 
many of its formal doctrines have ceased to impart to 
our minds the needed impulse to fight the battle of life 
bravely and the confidence that we shall win it. The 
Christian message of salvation demands restatement. 
Certain fundamental principles of our modern Protestant 
religious life are basic to our constructive study of the 
subject. 


114 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


. I. FROM THE MODERN PROTESTANT CHRISTIAN STAND- 


POINT THE MOST SIGNIFICANT THING IN ALL 
THE WORLD IS THE CONSCIOUS PER- 
SONAL EXPERIENCE OF 
THE BETTER LIFE. 


The familiar picture of Luther at Worms standing 
alone in the presence of the members of the Imperial 
Diet and the assembled dignitaries of the Roman Church, 
with the great words falling from his lips: ‘‘Here I stand. 
I can no other. So help me God!” present a dramatic 
moment in human history. The striking fact in the scene 
is the man standing there in his conscious selfhood and 
confronting unafraid the whole might of the established 
order of church and state, because he feels within himself 
a divine constraint to do just his deed. His action is 
expressive of the conviction that in the immediate per- 
sonal relation to God is found the highest ground of all 
human conduct. To this all other ‘‘authorities’”’ must be 
forever subordinate. All institutions among men, how- 
ever hoary with age or glorious in repute, must be but a 
means to this high end. They have a right to be, only in 
so far as they minister to this divine relationship. Re- 
versing this order, they become tyrannies to be resisted 
to the death. 

How comes it that the impressive scene at Worms has 
been so far-reaching, so heartening to the faith of multi- 
tudes? Because it has aroused in each one who has felt 
its influence a new sense of the sacredness of his own 
personality, an awareness of his own right of access to 
the Highest, and a conviction of his own mission to the 
world of men. This is the thing of importance for each 


THE MODERN PROTESTANT POINT OF VIEW 115 


of us. Until this point is reached in our career we are 
unable to feel sure that we have entered upon the better 
life. But this once attained, everything henceforward 
takes on a character correspondingly new. God having 
spoken to us, the world is our native sphere—its terrors 
gone, its friendship assured, the physical universe itself 
our helper. 

This expresses not only the genius of Protestantism, 
it is the heart of the Christian faith itself. The Author of 
this faith himself once stood alone facing an indifferent, 
cowardly or hostile world but, supported by the assur- 
ance, ‘‘and yet I am not alone, for the Father is with 
me,’’ he was able, in spite of—nay, by means of—his 
seeming defeat, to project the quality of his personality 
into that same world with transforming power and win 
from it step by step an acknowledgment of his indis- 
pensability to its life. Despite our many timid and 
degrading reactions from this noblest of all incentives, 
it still stands as the mightiest and finally irresistible 
claim upon the latent energies of our nature. It is the 
unfading light that beacons the sailor over a dark and 
stormy sea to port. Men may profess supreme allegiance 
to their great institutions—church, school, state—but 
standing far above these in natural human esteem are 
the actual men and women, the great creative spirits, 
whose individual lives stand out on the horizon as epi- 
tomes of the life of whole peoples. In such men a whole 
nation may find its own ideal. The story of the rise of 
the great historic Christian bodies is the story of the 
working of the fuller interpretation of life which some 
individual has brought into action by his advent. What 
is true as respects the creative influence operating in 


116 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


great aggregations of people is also true of the life of the 
smaller local communities. In short, the history of the 
Christian faith is itself the story of the human personality 
coming to its true selfhood. 

But the story of the Christian faith is not to be under- 
stood apart from the life of the race. The Christian faith, 
‘in the aspect of it referred to, but brings to clear light 
the source of every great creative and recuperative force 
at work in history. The man is never a mere means to an 
economic, political, ecclesiastical or social order or to 
all of these put together. To make him such would be to 
pervert his nature and reverse the predetermined destiny 
of mankind. All institutions or orders are really aggrega- 
tions of the ways in which human persons, the world 
over, conduct themselves toward one another and 
impart their inner character directly to one another. 
Men make them and unmake them as the need requires. 
They come and go, but men go on forever. They are 
instruments, men, the agents. Personality holds the 
supreme place in our human world. This is the great 
truth laid hold of in the Christian faith. Its progress 
among any people is exhibited by the growing strength 
and clearness of their sense of personal worth. 

1. The power and prerogative of self-judgment decide 
the locus of the highest court of appeal among us. Courts of 
justice but bring to light and action the quality and 
working of the life that we live. The end that is served 
by the courts is not the subjection of him who is judged 
to a power that is purely outside or alien to himself. The 
aim is rather to reveal to him and to those who witness 
the trial the character of the pronouncement which they 
all would pass themselves under the same circumstances. 


THE MODERN PROTESTANT POINT OF VIEW © 117 


The public administration of justice reaches its ideal 
end only when, and in so far as, the pronouncement of 
the court becomes a self-pronouncement. The aim, as 
far as the one on trial is concerned, is the same as the 
aim for all, namely, to disclose to him the real sentence 
which he, in his true selfhood, would pronounce on his 
own deeds. The aim of justice is personal salvation, that 
is, the realization of one’s true selfhood. 

In the Christian faith, especially, is this brought to 
light. The Christian teacher seeks not to convict other 
men of sin and pronounce judgment on them but to 
make his own self-judgment theirs. His business is not 
to charge men with being sinners but to awaken in 
them that latent power of self-judgment by whose action 
they are enabled to say, ‘‘I am a sinner. God be merciful 
to me.”’ No man in his appeal to his fellows is competent 
to go further than this. Or, if I dare to say to my fellow- 
man; ‘You are a sinner,” I do it, not as one who possesses 
information about him or authority over him, but I am 
only speaking on his behalf as I should be willing to have 
him speak on my behalf. The man’s self-estimate must 
come into action in the end or all is in vain. 

We see, then, the meaning of the vigorous and suc- 
cessful Protestant protest against the priestly pronounce- 
ment of absolution upon the penitent. The priest was not 
supposed to speak from himself as an individual but on 
behalf of the institution, the church, whose official 
representative he was. But this was an offense of like 
character to the assumption of personal authority over 
others. For it was to set the conscience of the order 
above the conscience of the man—an intolerable viola- 
tion of his prerogative. The church stood not nearer to 


118 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


God than did the man. No man or society can absolve 
me from sin just as no man or society can accuse me of 
sin with right except in so far as he or it utters the voice 
of God speaking in my own soul. If then, as a matter 
of fact, individuals pass judgment on one another, such. 
judgments are valid only in so far as he who judges inter- 
prets truly the judgment which the other, when truly 
self-aware, would pass on himself. 

Now the great basic fact in the newer Protestant inter- 
pretation of the Christian salvation is the personal exper- 
ience of betterment. (See footnote.)? The question, how I 
came to have this experience, is a legitimate subject for 
investigation, but it is not yet fully answered. Similarly, 
of the question, how others came to share the experience 
with me. But all such problems arise out of the action of a 
conscious selfhood that makes for itself the final pro- 
nouncement as to the reality, the character and the 
meaning of its own conscious life. 

2. The Protestant religious experience has tmmedzate 
reference to moral action and embraces the affirmation of 
personal betterment. It pertains, that is, to the realm of 
the practical. It is attained, not by retirement from the 
affairs of men and the objects of the senses in order that 
one may contemplate in silence the mystery of existence 
or the nature of ultimate being, but it occurs in the 


The term ‘experience’ refers here not to some psychophysical event known by 
observation or inference to another person, but to an occurrence within the mind of 
him whose experience it is. Nor does it mean some event that stands out separate 
from all other events in his memory. The mystery of memory has not yet been 
solved, we do not know just how and when the ‘subconscious’ in our mind passes 
into the conscious, nor the latter into the former. We refer here, the rather, to the 
one unbroken series of thoughts, volitions and feelings which are unified in my 
mind in such a way that I can call them mine in a sense in which no other can call 
them his. They are not mere happenings to my mind but they occur within my 
mind. They are ‘experiences’ because they belong to one life-long experience in 
which I am aware of myself as present to them all. Hence, in the end, I am myself 
the authoritative expounder of those events. 


THE MODERN PROTESTANT POINT OF VIEW _ 119 


midst of the toil and strain of the common life. It occurs 
not in the moment of unutterable ecstasy, when one 
feels himself exalted into the realm from which all that is 
physical and temporal becomes nothingness, but it 
springs up in the heart when the eternal significance of 
the physical and temporal conditions of our life flashes 
on our spirit. It comes to us when we have heard the 
summons to a great task of which our present task is a 
part, when we feel ourselves laid hold of by an obliga- 
tion to achieve the hitherto unaccomplished, when we 
come under the control of an unqualified imperative to 
do the perfect deed, to live the perfect life. 

Accordingly, the Protestant religious experience bears 
the scars of the smitings of conscience. In the prospect 
of that unaccomplished task which has been held unre- 
mittingly before us, the whole of our past, even at its 
best, is a coming-short, a failure, a dereliction of duty— 
guilt. The Protestant has accordingly, a sense of sin far 
outreaching in its severity the Catholic. Sin is never for 4 
him a mere defect of nature, or ignorance, or the becloud- et 
ing of the spiritual through its imprisonment in the 
material. It is a matter of the will, a self-direction to an 
evil end. Nothing ever merely happens to us. We con- 
stitute our own character. For the Protestant, all the 
relations of life are summed up in the personal relation. 
God is to him everlastingly a person and all the misdeeds 
of his life take on the character of a personal offense, a 
violation of personal worth, a crime. It is not the mis- 
fortunes of life that oppress the Protestant, but its mis- 
deeds, each of which carries with it this same perversion 
of the will. A marked feature of the Protestant judgment 
is its uncompromising severity. 


120 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


But this is only the obverse side of the Protestant 
religious experience. It is not merely or mainly an exper- 
ience of gloom, or depression, or helplessness but an 
experience of vast empowerment of will, of capacity for 
the achievement of the hitherto unattained. Indeed, the . 
secret of the sense of sin and failure lies in the coming 
upon one of the power of the Mightier within him. The 
very possibility of our passing the sentence of condemna- 
tion on our past lies in our present transcendence of the 
past. So radical and decisive is the change that it is as 
though one stood in the criminal dock in the high court 
of Heaven and heard at one moment the charge of guilt 
and in the next moment the irrevocable decree of release 
from the charge. Hence the thorough-going repudiation 
by Protestants of the bargaining casuistry of the Roman 
Church—its penitential system, its indulgences, its 
purgatory, because the whole seemed to them a com- 
plicated device for blurring the inward recognition of the 
inviolable and eternal law of life. Hence also the Prot- 
estant doctrine of justification by faith sprang from the 
sense of deliverance as no mere dismissal of an accusation 
of guilt, no “letting go,” no mere restoration to a pristine 
condition of innocence lost long ago, but the gaining of a 
positive rightness, a real fulfillment of the law of upright- 
ness within the soul. To understand the real basis of that 
doctrine we must go beyond the formal statement of it, 
which the times seemed to require, to that self-direction 
of the will to the higher life without which the doctrine 
would have been only a means of promoting a spirit of 
lawlessness. 

The Protestant religious experience registers the Chris- 
tian conscious transition from moral failure to joyful 


THE MODERN PROTESTANT POINT OF VIEW 121 


strength. Prior to this conversion the effort to master 
one’s lower nature seemed thwarted by a law of the sin 
warring in the physical members against the law of 
conscience. But now the situation is reversed. Bondage 
to the evil has given place to liberty to the good. The 
man feels that he is free. Henceforward there is a definite 
self-commitment to every ‘‘cause’’ that is supported by 
the moral judgment. 

This does not mean that for the subject of this exper- 
ience the moral struggle has ceased. On the contrary, it 
is intensified. The awareness of defect is never wanting in 
the presence of the new moral demands that continually 
arise, and yet with this the certainty of moral betterment 
is not obliterated but rather confirmed. There is no 
looking backward to a fancied better state from which 
we have fallen but a prophetic anticipation of the better 
ever more perfectly to be realized. 

3. The new confidence in respect to one’s own future is 
reflected outwards in a new estimate of the worth of one’s 
fellowmen. This new confidence in one’s own future begets 
a new hope for theirs. In them there come to light qualities 
hitherto undiscovered. There is a new interest in them, 
a new attractiveness about them. Wrongs are forgotten. 
Antipathies are subdued. Jealousy and malice become 
repugnant. Pride and contempt give place to a longing 
to serve them. Divisions are healed. The effort to attain 
to inner unity with them by bestowing one’s self upon 
them begets a new companionship, a new order of com- 
munity life. Protestant individualism is not a divisive 
force but works toward the ultimate unification of the 
life of our whole humanity. 


122 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


When one becomes aware that the voice that speaks 
within him and reveals his participation in the higher 
life is the utterance of the authoritative moral judgment, 
that is, the expression of the divine mind in the human 
consciousness, he also becomes aware that this comes | 
not to him in independence of his relation to other men. 
At the same time he hears within himself the summons 
to communicate his secret to others. He becomes aware 
of the profound mutuality between man and man. In 
the end he sees that one mind is interpretative of all, 
one heart beating high with emotion in all, one will 
determining the will that is operative in all, in so far as 
this new experience of his is the experience of all. There 
rises then before him the possibility of finding that the 
priceless gift that has come to him, as he believes, from 
God, is an inheritance of the fruitage of the struggles of 
men like himself in the ages of the past. He is truly a 
child of the race. There rises before him also the prospect 
of being in his turn the mediator of like gifts to those who 
are yet to come after him. 

4. A further characteristic of Protestant individualism 
as its free self-devotion to an all-commanding, all-controlling, 
all-empowering personality. This is implied in the fore- 
going but is worthy of more explicit statement here. 

Early Protestants affirmed the authority of the Bible. 
It was because these writings disclosed the character of 
the higher personality. They held the perfect personality 
superior to the most perfect order. The Anabaptists had 
held allegiance to Jesus as the perfect Exemplar but this 
was quite unsatisfactory to Protestants generally. They 
saw in Christ one who gave himself to the bearing of the 
penalty of the violated divine law in self-substitution for 


THE MODERN PROTESTANT POINT OF VIEW 123 


others and who thereby became the source of all the good 
they held or hoped for. Their theories of atonement were 
their attempts to justify their confidence in him as the real 
source of their rightness, though they gave their theory 
a legal twist. The theory itself is of much less account 
than the interest which the theory sought to serve. In | 
other words, it was the actual participation on their part 
in the quality of life that manifested its glory on the 
cross and their confidence that thereby they had become 
sharers in the perfect life, that led them to frame a 
theory that seemed to show that their faith was 
warranted. 

What really occurred, then, was this: Their reading 
of the New Testament combined with the impress which 
generation after generation of Christians had made 
upon their outlook on life to awaken their souls to the 
significance of the personality of the vicarious Sufferer. 
Their emotional nature reacted in a feeling of absolute 
dependence upon that Ideal Personality who had pro- 
jected himself with such purifying power into human life. 
All the good that was in them they had received. All 
was of grace. They were as men who had been born over 
again to a higher life. They were the subjects of the 
action of another, who surely could not be less than God. 
It was this profound awareness of the blessedness of 
subjecting themselves in the entirety of their being to 
the will of the ideal Christ that enabled them to discard 
all those human contrivances which had that end in 
view, as profane attempts to divert men from Him who 
had given his very spirit to them. The life of Protestant- 
ism gathers about the personality of Jesus Christ and not 
about an institutional order. The growing apprehension 


124 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


of the meaning of that Figure has operated with con- 
trolling power in the reinterpretation of our inherited 
ways of thinking on all subjects. This deeper apprecia- 
tion of the meaning of that personality whom we call 
Jesus Christ, associated with the progress of the Protest- 
ant communities and their scientific knowledge, has 
produced within us the conviction that salvation in the 
true Christian sense, means the progressive fulfillment 
of the inner potencies of our human spirit. We shall pres- 
ently refer to this subject more fully. 


Il. THE POWER OF THE PROTESTANT CHRISTIAN FAITH IS 
MANIFEST IN ITS DEVELOPING COMMUNITY LIFE. 


The intense personalism of Protestantism seemed, to 
Roman Catholics, bound to create increasing division 
and strife, inasmuch as it encouraged every man to 
regard himself as a free interpreter of the divine mind 
and an organ of the divine will. Fostering a spirit of self- 
affirmation and of personal aggressiveness, would it not 
tend to set every man’s hand against his neighbor? 
Would it not tend to encourage the selfish spirit that 
makes every other man and every institution a mere 
means to its own ends? Would it not tend to fill the world 
with anarchy? If so, the Protestant “salvation”? must 
turn out to be that from which every man must pray 
devoutly to be saved. Fears like these were shared by 
not a few non-Catholics. The long and bloody wars that 
followed the Protestant outbreak, the civil and fratricidal 
strife that desolated the British Isles, France, Holland 
and many parts of Germany seemed to proclaim the new 
found freedom a freedom to destroy. 


THE MODERN PROTESTANT POINT OF VIEW 125 


A parallel to the political strife and confusion was 
found in the religious dissensions. Variant interpretations 
of scripture and doctrinal disputes among Protestants 
multiplied. Dissent tended to break up the state-churches. 
Rival religious bodies steadily grew in numbers. These 
signs of a coming dissolution were accompanied by the 
assaults of new philosophies from within Protestantism 
upon the citadel of traditional orthodoxy. 

Reflective minds began to seek a theory of life that 
would provide a way of safety from the dangers lurking 
in a self-assertive individualism. The Ethics of Baruch 
Spinoza, the Jew, displayed the vanity and futility of all 
our strifes by unfolding a pantheistic interpretation of 
existence. Individualism was annulled. All forms of 
being were modes of the one eternal Substance, God. 
He whose eyes have been opened to perceive the one 
Being in whom we all live will cease from the vain imag- 
inings and struggles that fill the world with sorrow and 
pain, and he will be at peace. Thomas Hobbes, the Eng- 
lishman, chose a different path to the same end. Holding 
that human nature is under the sway of selfish desire and 
that wars spring naturally from conflicting desires, he 
proposed in his Leviathan a scheme of government 
founded on the renunciation by all of their individual 
aims and the commitment of all authority to one sole 
absolute Ruler—a benevolent despotism. Jean Jacques 
Rousseau, the Frenchman, in his Contrat Sociale sought 
the same end by a different method. Instead of directly 
annulling the rights of the individual members of a 
political community he aimed rather to persuade all to 
use their franchise in establishing the authority of the 
General Will, the individual being thereby assured of the 


126 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


better satisfaction of his needs than the exercise of his 
individual will in its separateness could possibly secure. 
Schopenhauer, the German, at a later date, developed 
his theory of the essentially evil character of all individual 
life and hoped, Buddha-like, for blessedness through the . 
extinction of desire, the source of all evil. 

These theories represent temporary reactions against 
the bold, confident spirit of the Protestant spirit, reac- 
tions which, if successful, could allay strife and put an 
end to warfare only at the cost of a retreat from the 
great tasks which life thrusts upon every man and at the 
cost of a renunciation of personality itself. We perceive 
the kinship of these views with the Catholic policy of 
suppressing individual initiative and also with the inher- 
ited Protestant inhibition of good works as a means of 
salvation on the ground that the human will is thor- 
oughly depraved by inheritance from a fallen Adam. It is 
the remnant of this early Protestant inheritance from 
Catholicism that is still provocative of suspicion toward 
every new movement of thought that seems to threaten 
the stability of the faith of the fathers. 

The Catholic system has as one of its foundation 
stones an attitude of suspicion and distrust toward the 
individual. Its doctrine of the Fall and Original Sin, 
while reminiscent of an unrealized ideal humanity, set 
the ideal in the past and accounted for the loss of it by 
the individual’s affirmation of his own will. The ortho- 
dox Protestant retention of this view in a severe form 
has proved a handicap in the advance toward the ideal 
community life. 

But now, after four centuries of Protestant life, it has 
become evident that the spirit of the newer faith is not 


THE MODERN PROTESTANT POINT OF VIEW 127 


essentially divisive but communion-forming on a broad 
scale. Its true import is steadily becoming clearer. The 
older faith made the individual mainly recipient in regard 
to salvation, while the newer faith makes him mainly 
communicative. The older faith tended to the exclusion 
of his will as positively contributory toward the higher 
life, while the newer faith seeks to awaken his will to a 
higher activity. The older faith conceived grace mainly 
as bestowed on its possessor, while the newer faith con- 
celves it mainly as exercised by him. The older faith 
pictured to the human imagination a heaven of rest in 
another world where no tasks and no toils would be 
imposed on the blessed, while the newer faith is repelled 
by the spirit of selfishness that was fostered by this older 
view, and aspires to the achievement of tasks ever 
increasing in their greatness, as the true ideal to be 
sought. We see that the true Protestant is not world- 
weary, or tired of life, or hesitant in accepting new 
responsibility, or timid in the presence of great demands 
upon him, but glories in them. Whereas of old it was 
said to be Christ’s exclusive prerogative to be a vicarious 
sufferer for the sins of others, now it is the source of 
the highest joy to the believer to know that he may 
utterly share the “fellowship of his sufferings and be 
made comformable to his death.”’ And this is itself an 
instance of the manner in which the newer faith has been 
at work steadily annulling the gulf between heaven and 
earth, between this world and the next, and making life 
here and life hereafter one in principle. In other words, 
it has been steadily turning from a conception of salva- 
tion that made it a specially devised plan for securing to 
men a mode of safe transition from this world to the 


128 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


next, when one comes to die, to the conception that the 
entrance here and now into the higher life, the eternal 
life of God, is salvation. Thus it developes the life of the 
higher communion right in the midst of the common 
secular tasks of life and discards the Catholic view of the. 
separateness of the life of the ‘‘religious.”’ It places the 
priest and the layman on the same level and breaks down 
the artificial barrier between them, making them mem- 
bers of the same comntunity, and on the same basis. 
This communion-forming power is visibly at work in 
the growth of the free religious associations among Prot- 
estants. The free churches are the product of personal 
freedom of action. Protestant churches are not constitut- 
ed by the imposition of an order from without, to which 
the human individual must submit in order to share in its 
grace, but they are constituted by the free mutual min- 
istry of individuals. Were all the church organizations 
in the world to disappear today, new organizations, as 
truly fitted to their purpose, would be brought into being 
tomorrow by the free persons who seek to communicate 
the high worth of their own personality to their fellow- 
men. That is to say, the act of outer separation from the 
institutions of the older order is justified on the ground 
that this step was taken in pursuance of a fuller realiza- 
tion of the Christian communion. The basis of it was 
broader and deeper than that which it sought to dis- 
place. At the present time these free associations cover 
vast areas of the earth and embrace within their fellow- 
ship great multitudes of people of many races and 
languages. The free churches, with their foundation in 
the worth of the free man, are pointing the way to the 
richer unification of humanity the world over. The very 


THE MODERN PROTESTANT POINT OF VIEW 129 


multiplication of religious denominations, an inevitable 
outcome of freedom, so often looked on as wholly evil, 
is now seen to have marked the path to a breadth of 
spirit, a mutual toleration, a sympathy and ministry 
heretofore unrealized. 

This Protestant spirit of mutual trust and love is now 
affirming itself on an unparalleled scale in the constitu- 
tion of a great multiplicity of benevolent institutions 
and enterprises stretching away beyond denominational 
lines, affecting all the walks of life and all enterprises, 
from the common school maintained by common con- 
sent from the public funds to the organizations that seek 
to infuse into nations and empires a spirit of world- 
brotherhood. These signalize the progress of the Chris- 
tian salvation in the world of men, the coming of the 
Kingdom of God on earth. 


Ill. THE NEWER PROTESTANT INTERPRETATION OF THE 
CHRISTIAN FAITH EMBRACES A DEEPENING INSIGHT 
INTO THE MYSTERY OF MAN’S RELATION TO HIS 
UNIVERSE AND A RICHER FELLOWSHIP 

WITH IT. 


We have pointed out that in a true Protestantism 
there is no spirit of world-flight. As it has gradually 
parted company with the Catholic doctrine of the fall of 
man from an earlier state of holiness, so also it has parted 
with the Catholic doctrine that the physical order is the 
seat of evil. The sense of kinship with nature has deeply 
permeated the Protestant mind. It has sought to possess 
itself of nature’s secret, with no misgivings as to the 
outcome. The old rationalist protest against the tradi- 
tional disparagement of the natural was well grounded. 


130 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


To tell the story of the way in which the Protestant 
faith has become aware of its inherent character in this 
regard is to trace the onward march of modern science. 
Faith in God and distrust of the world are unhappy 
companions in the same bosom. As man has arrived at a 
knowledge of his true selfhood through a fellowship with 
God, so also has it been with respect to his fellowship with 
the world. As he succeeds in persuading Nature to divulge 
her secret to him, he uncovers his own hidden personality. 
His progressive discovery of the constitution of the 
universe is so far forth a self-discovery. 

To part company with those who disparage the world 
of nature is to part company presently with those who 
make the Christian faith to repose on miracles in the 
sense of an interference with nature from without. At 
first, Protestant men of science were rather startled at 
the inferences naturally drawn from their own discover- 
ies and would fain have set apart a separate realm for 
their religious faith and for the gift of salvation, regarded 
as an extraneous deliverance. For they had inherited the 
view that it was a process temporarily interpolated into 
the natural course of human affairs. This would seem to 
demand an extraneous Deity from whom the Saviour 
came into this world and to whom he went back again 
that we might also ascend by non-natural means. More 
and more the modern man has come to feel that all 
worlds constitute one universe, the constitution of the 
many worlds is the same everywhere, and more and more 
he feels that the constitution of man, a denizen of the 
universe, must be such as makes him at home in it. 

In this way the entire field of human knowledge is 
being remapped with a breadth of survey and minute- 


THE MODERN PROTESTANT POINT OF VIEW 131 


ness of detail far beyond the farthest stretch of the 
imagination of our fathers. The story of origins is being 
retold with particular care. The history of human life is 
being worked out with supreme regard for fact and inde- 
pendently of the earlier orthodox doctrine. It is found 
that the story of human origins is but a chapter in the 
story of life. But life itself is so bound up with inanimate 
existence that the search for some universal principle 
immanent in all being is prosecuted by science—at this 
point become philosophy—with an ardor that springs 
from the feeling that the well-being of all is at stake. 
There can be good in store for men only if the universe 
itself is good. 

This scientific pursuit has invested the story of relig- 
ion with a deep interest. Religion appears as a salient 
feature of the whole of human life. No longer can it be 
viewed as a product of priestly invention, as the older 
rationalists once said, but it is seen to be itself an implicit 
interpretation of life in such a universe as ours. It is no 
abnormality in man. But while this annuls the objections 
of the older rationalism it involves a very thorough- 
going reinterpretation of the Christian religion. This new 
interpretation is suggested by the Protestant faith. 

The assurance of moral betterment, then, issues in a 
new attitude toward the material world. In place of a 
shrinking terror in the presence of the mysterious powers 
of the universe there arises a spirit of enterprise world- 
ward. World-flight, as has been said, is no Protestant 
virtue. The world is ours to know and to possess. Its 
secrets are to be unveiled to our minds and its forces to 
be appropriated to our purposes. It invites us to make 
its real wealth our own. The Protestant Christian faith 


132 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


is economically fertile. It was not as man of science nor 
as philosopher, but as an exponent of Christian faith 
that Paul uttered the great words: ‘‘And we know that 
all things work together for good to them that love God.”’ 
This is also the true Protestant faith. The conquest of . 
moral evil within the bosom carries with it the power to 
conquer the forces of nature and make them ministrant 
to a universal human good. The moral pessimism of 
Catholicism in the face of nature has given place in 
Protestantism to a moral optimism. As God is no longer 
set over against man, as the divine is no longer the anti- 
human or the unhuman, so also is God no longer set over 
against the world as spirit against matter. Physical being 
is no longer fallen being. The physical order is a harmony 
and not a discord. It is vibrant with the song of divine 
goodness. It invites us truly to fellowship with God and 
fellowship with men. Thus the impulse to social better- 
ment and the impulse to scientific achievement spring 
alike from the experience of moral conversion on the part 
of the individual. 

If to multitudes of primitive Christians salvation was 
viewed as deliverance from the power of the evil demons 
to be completed at the time of the great physical cata- 
clysm and the bodily advent of the Messiah from the 
skies; if to the Graeco-oriental of a later date it was 
identical with a transmutation of the corruptible human 
nature into the likeness of the incorruptible divine nature 
through the ministration of the divine mysteries; if to 
the Roman Catholic of a still later date and of another 
race it was deliverance from the fires of purgatory and 
hell through the use of sacraments in priestly hands; 
and if, finally, to the early Protestant it was mainly a 


THE MODERN PROTESTANT POINT OF VIEW 133 


present acquittal before the bar of God through the sub- 
stitutionary sufferings of Christ and the faith of the 
believer; to the modern Protestant it is the bringing of 
the man into such a fellowship with God as gives him a 
self-mastery and a self-devotion to the highest end of 
life. It is the entrance into an experience of conscious 
unity of life with one’s fellowmen, a participation in the 
ministry of a universal good. It is to be endowed with 
that spirit of enterprise that enables him to turn the 
forces of the material world toward their true end, to 
make them angels of mercy sent forth to do service for 
the sake of them that shall inherit salvation. This newer 
interpretation we shall proceed to unfold more explicitly 
in the chapters that follow. 


CHAPTER VII 
THE BASIC AFFIRMATION. 


The preceding discussions have steadily led us in the 
direction of finding our standard for the interpretation of 
the Christian salvation within the communion of the 
Protestant faith. But we have seen that its first exposi- 
tors’ insight into the meaning of that faith was very 
imperfect, and naturally so. Moreover, they were directed 
by the exigencies of religious controversy and of political 
and economic strife to clothe their interpretations in the 
customary garb of the times. Protestants, generally, had a 
very imperfect apprehension of the meaning of their 
Protestantism. But with the passing of four centuries of 
tremendous activity they have lived out the Protestant 
life in a fulness far greater than was possible for its first 
representatives and they have gradually owtlived much 
of the ritual, the church order and the creedal affirma- 
tions of the early days. Just as the genius of the human 
mind comes to fuller light in the adult than it can possibly 
do in the child, so also the genius of the Protestant faith 
has come far more clearly to consciousness in our day 
than was possible for it to do four centuries ago. The 
summary we have given, in preceding chapters, of the 
principal stages of the Christian life, as these come to 
culmination in modern Protestantism, will now be our 
guide in our formulation of the basis of that life. 

We made, we trust, a further discovery, to wit, that 
the Christian hope of salvation, as that comes to enriched 


134 


THE BASIC AFFIRMATION 135 


fulfilment in Protestantism, stands in no extraneous 
relation to those hopes that everywhere nerve mankind 
continually onward to new endeavors for betterment. 
The Christian hope of salvation zs the universal human 
hope, purified, clarified, magnified into ever grander 
power. By its light we read back into past generations 
and ages the great persistent affirmations of the meaning 
of human life everywhere. It is not so much the exclusive- 
ness as it is the inclusiveness of the Christian faith that 
impresses us today. In its high worth we find a higher 
scale of values for mankind generally. Thus are we led 
onward to the affirmation that is basic to all human utter- 
ances of hope in a Better in store for mankind. This 
basic affirmation is the declaration of the swpreme worth 
of personality—its ultimate supremacy in the universe. 

In our exposition of this position we shall first present 
it apart from the specifically Christian experience and 
afterwards connect it generally with the Christian idea 
of salvation. 


I, THE ADVENT OF PERSONALITY. 


At some time relatively early in the life of every human 
child there springs into action within him a mysterious 
power without which he could not be called truly human. 
Not until long after others have observed in the child 
the action of this inner potency does the child himself 
become aware of its presence. I refer to what we may 
call the sense of selfhood, to a thinking in which the 
self is not only implicated but distinctly in mind, to 
that which is or becomes the eternal I AM of the Man. 


136 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


This distinctively human endowment challenges today 
more insistently than at any time in the past the ability 
of the thinker to explain it. 

This challenge was in the mind of Alfred Tennyson — 
when he wrote the following stanzas in his In Memoriam: 


The baby new to earth and sky, 
What time his tender palm is prest 
Against the circle of the breast, 

Has never thought that ‘‘This is I.”’ 


But as he grows he gathers much, 
And learns the use of ‘‘I”’ and ‘‘Me,”’ 
And finds, “‘I am not what I see, 
And other than the things I touch.” 


So rounds he to a separate mind 
From which clear memory may begin, 
As through the frame that shuts him in 
His isolation grows defined. 


His isolation! There lies the key to all the tragedies and 
triumphs that may await him. 

1. When does personality come to the birth? The question 
has not been clearly answered. If personality is at last 
self-awareness, then psychologists have not succeeded in 
discovering the most rudimentary beginnings of this 
self-awareness or in tracing with sure step the course of 
its development. Its presence is not to be detected with 
certainty in the infant, for no regular or consistent mode 
or power of expression is acquired by it for a time. We 
cannot decide with certainty whether the little child’s 
bodily activities, which seem to the onlooker to be purely 
involuntary muscular effects of unconscious nervous 


THE BASIC AFFIRMATION 137 


action, arouse its mentality to work or whether there 
may be in the child movements of will that produce 
muscular movements as they do in the case of the man. 
Memory can give but little help here. For it carries us 
back only to a comparatively late date in our child life. 
No man remembers when he began to think or to be 
aware of himself as separate in some sense from others. 
All the inferences which we may obtain on this point 
by observing instances of unconscious nervous action in 
people or by probing our own mature intelligence are 
very precarious. The outcome is likely to be a confirma- 
tion of the opinions we bring to the study rather than an 
increase of real knowledge. But if the conditions or the 
time of the original appearing of self-consciousness in 
the life of the individual cannot be found, it matters 
little. That the advent of self-consciousness, if it has a 
birth-hour, should remain forever a mystery only indi- 
cates that in this field as in all others, there is a limit 
beyond which our search cannot be carried. 

It is clear, however, that what may seem at first mere 
physical cravings of the child soon take on a definiteness 
of desire and action that evince the working in him of 
some order of intelligence. He soon comes to exhibit 
resentment or anger—or that which would be called such 
in the adult—when his cravings go unheeded. Parents 
early find it is necessary to place him under discipline, 
that is, they must treat him, at any rate, as if he were 
already incipient personality. Indeed, we may say that 
the secret of the loving care that is bestowed on the 
infant member of the household lies in the common 
expectation that he is destined to become fully personal. 
‘When that day arrives the event may prove very start- 


138 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


ling to the parents. Both he and they must learn the 
difficult lesson how to adjust themselves to the new situa- 
tion—“‘his isolation.”” The discovery that there are 
private chambers in the child’s nature into which they _ 
cannot penetrate begets unutterable anxieties in the 
parent breast (one wonders whether this may be true of a 
Heavenly Father!). To realize that he has the right to 
choose his own way in the world and by degrees to 
determine his own destiny brings to the parents fears 
and longings too deep for utterance. The child at length 
becomes his own master as truly as they. 

We may safely affirm, therefore, that, although for a 
period of time, varying in its length in different cases, 
we can perceive no immediate self-awareness in a young 
child, yet that time will not be greatly prolonged if his life 
be normal. And this power, once acquired, will endure as 
long as humanity. The point of chief importance in this 
matter of the nature of personality is not so much our 
ability to mark the hour of its birth or even to trace its 
course onward, as it is to analyze and interpret its action 
in the mature man. Not while it is still in the blade but 
when it has become the full corn in the ear do we become 
acquainted with the true character of anything. The 
potentialities of the child are revealed in the man. 

2. Personality is not the name of a mere sum of exper- 
zences. Probably we are all somewhat familiar with the 
efforts of a certain group of investigators who, in the 
name of a purely empirical psychology, read personality 
out of existence except as the name for a sum of psychic 
events. This group hold that knowledge is nothing more 
than a concatenation or succession of these occurrences. 
The whole is called consciousness. “This string of ex- 


THE BASIC AFFIRMATION 139 


periences,”’ say they, “‘requires for its explanation nothing 
beyond the experiences themselves or a similar string of 
antecedent inner events. They simply are. These mere 
successions of feelings or ideas or volitions that rise in 
our consciousness somehow manage to get themselves 
into groups and obtain separate names. These groups of 
experiences are all that we refer to when we speak of 
persons. All, therefore, that we can be said to have in 
mind when we speak of this or that self or person is a 
collection of experiences that stay strung together or 
unified in some way long enough to bear fittingly a 
distinct name.”’ Even the marvellous working of mem- 
ory, they hold, is not necessarily anything more than 
one experience or group of experiences which may be said 
to be aware of another experience or group of experiences 
—whatever that may mean! 

A remark or two may be made in reply. The degree of 
plausibility that may attach to the above views rests 
clearly on the assumption that there really is a Succession 
of single feelings or ideas or volitions each of which is 
detachable from the others. But ‘itis not possible to 
point to any such experiences as a matter of fact. Our 
life is not made up of staccato notes. Every so-called 
single experience turns out under examination to have a 
definite character due to the relation it sustains in our 
minds to many other occurrences which in their entirety 
make up the field of experience. It is true that we may 
temporarily single out some inner event and separate it 
from the rest for the purposes of study, but we are aware 
at that moment that it still belongs to the whole body of 
experiences and that apart from them no character what- 
soever could be assigned to it. We can speak intelligently 


140 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


of different experiences only because they all fall within 
the circle of one whole experience. But those who hold 
to the views above referred to are utterly unable to 
account for this inclusive experience, since to speak of | 
experiences “‘somehow”’ getting themselves collected into 
groups is to abandon altogether the attempt to obtain a 
scientific view of experience. 

In the next place, it is interesting to observe that those 
very writers who say that we are not required to look 
beyond the mere succession of feelings or ideas or voli- 
tions to a person who has these experiences, are able to 
save themselves from uttering a meaningless jargon only 
by constantly introducing the personal pronouns. Sure- 
ly, in consistency, these pronouns ought to have been 
dispensed with. Thus they tacitly confess that they are 
compelled to take for granted that reality which they 
have seemingly argued out of existence. This is more 
than a mere habit of speech. It is not the ‘‘poverty of 
language’’ but the character of our conscious life that 
compels them to fall back upon the common habit of 
speech. That is to say that, were it not for the organizing 
activity of this self-conscious being, the “string of exper- 
iences’”’ would be snuffed out and be lost before the others 
could appear. Consequently all znterest in things would 
disappear. Of actual knowledge or action there would be 
none, because the knower and actor would be non- 
existent. Be 

An attempt has been made to take the cutting edge off 
this argument by saying substantiallyin reply: ““Granted 
this self-consciousness of which you speak, is it not after 
all just one of the happenings that we call our exper- 
iences? That is to say, when I speak or think of my own 


THE BASIC AFFIRMATION ; 141 


self or other selves there is always, besides the feelings 
now present and the remembrance of feelings past, a 
picture of a distinctly physical being with all those temp- 
orary and external features that belong to any object 
perceived by the senses or held in the memory. So that 
our real self of which we can speak intelligently to one 
another is just one of our passing experiences. In course 
of time, like everything else, it changes and passes away. 
This collection of experiences has nothing but a temporary 
persistence in our thoughts and cannot be allowed any 
value in itself.” 

And to this, again, it is to be answered briefly: Even 
if it be true that every picture of our real self which we 
may present to our own or another’s mind contains the 
temporary features claimed for it, this does not invalidate 
our position in any degree. No one denies that our self- 
consciousness is always connected with the, passing 
concrete facts of life and that apart) from them its action 
would not be what it is. But we claim that all these facts 
occur as facts for us by virtue of the action of a principle 
that holds them together and makes them its own. The 
world of sight and sound and touch is a real world to us 
because of the action of a real self whose world it is. 
We are not speaking of a self that ‘‘somehow”’ exists in 
and by itself without relation to the facts of our sense- 
life but of a self that never can be put in the same class 
with those facts, because they occur for it and not it for 
them. The point is: my experiences are because I am. 
This everlasting I AM stands. My experiences come 
and go, but I am always in the midst of them and im- 
plicated in their coming and going. Human consciousness 
is self-consciousness. It is the self conscious. 


142 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


3. The significance of the self is augmented when we 
recognize that there is a community of selves. Of course, 
it is not meant here to say that we ever have a distinct 
perception or consciousness of the self apart from all else 
but that in all feeling, thinking and willing I, who am 
aware of these, am not merely aware that there zs a 
feeling, a thought, a will to be considered but that in 
each case it is known as mine. I am the subject—they are 
in relation to me. And I am the agent—they proceed 
from me. To other persons they are expressions of me 
and material for their interpretation of me. I am not a 
mere unknowable somewhat, logically presupposed in 
these things. The truth is, I am aware of myself in being 
aware of any of these forms of action and passion. With- 
out me they lose their meaning. The “‘isolation’”’ of 
which the poet spoke, does not describe the whole truth 
of selfhood. The “‘thou’”’ and the “‘he” are as inevitable 
in consciousness as the “I.’’ While we cannot go into 
this great subject at length a few words may be said here. 

The child’s act of distinguishing himself from others 
is much more than a reference to his physical separate- 
ness, the exclusive space his body occupies or his exer- 
cise of the organs of his body in their unity. The distinc- 
tion becomes much more inward than outward for him. 
Whatever may be the process by which it comes about, 
the time certainly arrives when he finds other selves 
with each of whom he enjoys a reciprocity of experiences 
and to whom he attributes an inner constitution of the 
same kind as his own. That is, he sees or thinks he sees in 
their acts the same feelings or thoughts as he has under 
the same conditions. Indeed, it may well be that he dis- 
covers the selfhood of others before he distinctly reflects 


THE BASIC AFFIRMATION 143 


upon his own or even knows his own. Conscious selfhood 
seems fairly to be imparted from one to another. ‘“‘God 
breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of life and 
(thereby) man became a living soul.’”’ The lower person- 
ality is an impartation from the higher. We are never 
altogether alone in the inmost chamber of our mind. 
Nay, we cannot bear the thought of being alone. A life 
without some degree of conscious fellowship with other 
lives would not be a human life. Fellowship is not less 
evidently a fact in human life than its distinctness. The 
“T” of consciousness is never found without the “thou” 
and the “he,” and thence the ‘‘we’’ and the ‘“‘they”’ of 
experience become an indispensable fact. The experience 
of fellowship is coincident with self-consciousness as far 
as our knowledge of the matter goes. There is a constant 
longing also for the fellowship with others,’ which is 
inappeasable except by its fulfillment. A 

From these two cardinal affirmations, namely, of self- 
hood and of a community of selves, our human life gets 
its highest meaning. Alone, I should have no character, 
be neither good nor bad, have no aim and, so far as we 
can tell, have no knowledge. Not a deed of mine and not a 
movement of my thought can be contemplated by me 
with reference to its significance and worth unless its 
bearing upon others like myself be taken into account. 
Nor could the physical world around me have for me the 
inspiration or terror which it unquestionably has did I 
not find that it exists for another also and speaks to him 
as it does to me. In the end we all find ourselves treating 
that world as a medium of our fellowship with one an- 
other and as an instrument of our common purposes. 
Thus the very universe in which each one of us seems 


144 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


to fill so infinitesimal a place may well be chiefly regarded 
as the sphere for the realization of a human life of fellow- 
ship. 

4. Perchance we shall be met at this point by a challenge: 
“Let personality, true selfhood, be defined.”’ If we reply that. 
personality strictly speaking, cannot be defined, this 1s by 
no means derogatory to the claim we are making for person- 
ality. Definition has its essential place in the formulation 
of ideas. But there is a limit both to the possibility and 
to the uses of definition. The complex may be defined in 
terms of its more simple constituents, or the less under- 
stood by the better understood, or the less meaningful 
by the more meaningful. But personality presents a 
barrier to definition, not because its place in the context 
of life is obscure but because it is that out of which all 
else that is known to us obtains meaning. All definition 
is for the self-consciousness but there can be no definition 
of the self-consciousness, since it is self-consciousness that 
defines. If, therefore, the term definition be used in the 
strict sense, personality is indefinable. It is the ultimate 
in our search for the source of all feeling, knowledge or 
action. Personality is that which is self-conscious in all 
the forms of our consciousness. Personality, self-con- 
sciousness is and apart from it we cannot say that any 
thing else exists. 

Summing up this portion of our discussion, we say: 
We are more than the sum of our experiences. They are 
for us but they are not we. That which we call ourself 
is never a mere product of outer forces. We are never 
purely passive. We are never the sum of the effects of 
activities beyond us. Even in our so-called passive exper- 
iences we are truly active. So to say, we make even our 


THE BASIC AFFIRMATION 145 


own feelings and that, by the way, is the reason why we 
accept responsibility for them. All else is subordinate and 
tributary. But personality is never independent of its 
own kind. It is always in fellowship, it lives in and with 
other personalities. It has the prerogative of saying, 
“T am myself and am distinct from all things.’”’ But it 
has also the prerogative of saying, ‘‘I am more than my 
own self. For I find myself in others and them in me. I 
am a member of a fellowship of personalities.’’ Here is 
the basis of all religion. Salvation is the realization of 
this fellowship. 


Il. THE FULFILMENT OF PERSONALITY 


The foregoing statements are not intended to convey 
the idea that any man has become fully or wholly per- 
sonal. If we may say, in algebraic fashion, that person- 
ality is the coefficient that gives meaning and worth to 
everything with which we have to do, we are compelled 
to acknowledge in the presence of the unmeaning things 
and the errors, the miscarriages and the wrongs, the 
ugliness and the sins which constantly confront us, that 
we are all very imperfectly personal. Our feeling, our 
thinking, our willing never come perfectly under our own 
guidance and control. Here is the source of all the troubles 
and anxieties of our life, its dangers and terrors, its mis- 
carriages and failures. The supremacy of personality 
never becomes a proven fact. It always remains a faith 
and a hope. Nevertheless it is for the sake of the realiza- 
tion of this faith and hope that we are content to live at 
all. 

Let us hope that we have succeeded in making some 
progress in our aim to indicate the significance of all our 


146 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


human efforts in any direction whatsoever. We shall now 
attempt to present in outline the consequences of this 
method of interpretation. The limits of our space compel 
us to make our statements in somewhat dogmatic 
fashion. 7 
1. The achievements of science are modes in which our 
personality affirms its right and its power to conquer the 
universe for itself, that 1s, to make the universe a means of 
self-fulfilment. Natural science is often spoken of as a 
purely objective study of the facts accessible to our 
senses and of the laws that govern these facts. In such a 
pursuit all personal, private interest is said to be neces- 
sarily excluded. All facts are to be brought within a 
single unexceptional system or order that will stand in 
its own right independently of the likes or dislikes, the 
hopes and fears of the discoverer. It aims and strives 
unceasingly to find one whole world that embraces all 
facts and forces within itself, even though it must confess 
that no such world has yet been fully discovered. The 
man of science is supposed to risk vitiating the processes 
of his investigations if he makes any concessions to 
human preferences while collecting his data and drawing 
his conclusions. But this limitation which he prescribes 
for himself is only temporarily enforced after all. The 
man of science does not cease to be a human being. 
The truth of the matter is that, in order to secure accur- 
acy, he must avoid the confusion and distraction of mind 
that might arise from the effort to keep the whole field of 
knowledge and the final purpose of knowledge before 
him. So he limits for the time being the area of his 
investigations and leaves the ultimate problems to the 
philosopher. Each student of science moves freely with- 


THE BASIC AFFIRMATION 147 


in his chosen field and seeks to set aside the factors that 
do not bear directly on his special problem. But all the 
while he knows, or may know, quite well that both the 
methods he follows and the results he obtains are finally 
to be subjected to two great tests: First, he must face 
the necessity of bringing his discoveries into relation to 
discoveries made in other fields, so that these may be 
united with his own in a single rational system. Secondly, 
he must keep in mind that his results are to be placed 
in the end at the disposal of men, as a means to their 
good. ‘‘What is the final meaning of it all?” and, ‘‘Of 
what use is it all?’”’ are questions that he must ultimately 
face. Science must vindicate itself both teeta and 
practically. If it fails in either respect, it fails as science. 

The foregoing statement is equivalent to saying that 
in science there is a striving to make personality domi- 
nant in the universe. The very modes of thought and 
speech in which men of science seek to describe the kind 
of world they are discovering have been built up through 
long and patient effort on the part of human thinkers 
and were not given to us directly as ‘innate ideas.” 
Our very modes of thinking are achievements of the per- 
sonal spirit as it pushes onward toward its goal. When, 
for example, we speak of the “action” of certain objects 
perceived by us we are using the language of metaphor, 
that is, we are transferring to that which is without us 
the characteristics of that which is within us. The ‘‘influ- 
ences” or ‘changes’? through which these objects pass 
are real to us, indeed, but to them they are no influences 
or changes. By likening these to the changes effected by 
our own will we transfer to them by way of figure the 
kinds of activity that we ourselves consciously perform. 


148 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


Action is a matter of will and, in the end, nothing but 
acts of will can be dignified with the name of action. 
The same is true of our habit of referring to “force’”’ or 
“energy”? as present in the world. In no other way it 
seems, can we hope to make this outer world intelligible. 
Similarly, again, the “‘laws of nature” of which we speak 
so commonly, have meaning for us because the personal 
spirit prescribes for itself habits of action and seeks to 
give them a constancy that allows no place for arbitrari- 
ness or caprice. But in a world that was irregular, there 
would be no possibility of carrying into effect those laws 
which it ordains for itself. It is the self-directive activity — 
of our spirits that lies behind this tendency to find laws 
in nature. There is no “law,” no “ought,” no obligation 
in nature apart from personality. 

Science, then, is an attempt to place the stamp of the 
human mind upon the universe. It seeks to extend the 
sway of our spirit over all things. The secret of its explor- 
atory determination lies in its unconquerable faith, to 
wit, the prophetic expectation that the ultimate meaning 
of the universe will come to light through its ministry to 
the inherent powers of our personality. Confirmation of 
this interpretation of the scientific movement comes to 
hand almost daily. Powers of nature that at one time 
filled the minds of men only with dumb wonder or help- 
less terror have been harnessed to work in our human 
interest and now minister to the comfort of our homes 
and the joys of our firesides. The paradox of modern 
scientific discovery lies in the fact that while it has dis- 
closed to the modern man a universe whose vastness 
quickly outstretches the capacity of our intelligence even 
to conceive, the ancient terror of its mysterious forces 


THE BASIC AFFIRMATION 149 


has given place to a buoyant assurance that these are 
our friends and helpers. The world was made for us and 
not we for the world. 

Naturally enough, each man’s world seems to reflect 
his own character. The secret of our seeing it, as we do, 
each for himself, lies in our proneness to read its meaning 
in terms of our inmost life. How often we have discovered 
that the incongruities, the maladjustments, the strifes 
and wrongs of the physical universe, as we see it, are but 
reflections of the turbulency of our own nature! So long 
as we are not what we ought to be or would be, so long 
as we are in conflict with ourselves, the world will seem 
to aggravate our trouble. For it will constantly suggest 
new sources of conflict and new prospects of failure. On 
the other hand, with each new spiritual conquest, with 
the increase of the feeling of inner harmony and with the 
certainty of spiritual progress to come, we are enabled to 
perceive that the world is full of beauty and goodness and 
that it is ever opening to us new avenues to the higher 
life. ‘“‘All things work together for good to them that 
love God.” 

2. Did space but permit we might go on to show that 
the aim of formal logic, of art and of ethics is of the same 
character. When the logician sets forth his world of ab- 
stract thought he is expounding the methods of spiritual 
progress to which every man must adhere if he is to be 
saved from error in any mental enterprise whatsoever. 
When the artist paints the picture, carves the figure, 
writes the poem or sings his song, he too is transferring 
to seemingly non-human, unfeeling, dead matter the 


150 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


dearest and sweetest, the holiest and mightiest emotions 
of the personal spirit. Nature finds and knows herself 
only in the actions of her destined Master. 

And when we turn to the world of moral action, the 
world created by the free initiative of the personal will, 
we see that the systems of law and justice found among 
all tribes and peoples, great or small, find their meaning 
and their right in the fact that they attempt to set forth 
the manner in which a human personality may attain 
to its highest good. It will be found that the laws of this 
moral world which men have created or found for them- 
selves always refer in some way to the relations between 
our personality and the world that environs it. They tell 
why it is that we must subdue that external world and 
make it servant to our highest will. 

This inner conviction of man’s superiority to the 
mightiest facts and forces of the material universe is 
well voiced in the poem (in ‘fA Canadian Twilight’’) 
written by the youthful Bernard Trotter entitled, 


ALTARS 


Ye barren peaks, so mightily outlined 
In naked rock against the viewless sky, 
Your rugged grandeur mocks my human pride, 
And rouses it to passionate reply. 


Ye scorn the foot that treads your pathless ways, 
The voice that breaks your primal solitudes, 

Yea, e’en the eye that views your serried heights, 
The ear that hears your cannon interludes. 


THE BASIC AFFIRMATION 151 


Yet know that when your music-making brooks 
Have buried you beneath the conquering sea, 
And mingled heart of stone with oozy mud, 
The topmost summit with the level lea, 


This ear shall hear the deathless song of life, 
This eye shall see beyond the utmost skies, 

This voice shall sing soul-music, and this foot 
Shall tread the love-lit paths of paradise. 


Should I, then, born immortal, bow to you, y 

Who are but transient mounds of earthly clod? 
O glorious height—I kneel in humble awe 

To worship at the altars of my God. 


3. Personality comes to its fulfilment in and through the 
community of persons. Perhaps the most of us first make 
the discovery that we hold this community relation when 
we find that the independent exercise of our will is vetoed, 
that is, when another will asserts itself over against ours. 
When the child finds himself so placed that a higher will 
than his own is in control of him he has learned his first 
lesson in morality. That is, he finds that he has to curb 
and discipline his powers so as to exercise them in a direc- 
tion prescribed by a higher personal will. There must 
then be an adjustment of the two wills in relation to one 
another. With all their difference, the two must perform 
an act in common. From the moment that they come 
together both find that they seek a common good. The 
adjustment becomes mutual. The will of the very infant 
is not to be wholly subdued or crushed by another’s, not 
even by its parents’ will. Its will is rather to be strength- 


152 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


ened continually by encouraging it to bring its fitful 
acts into harmony with some single purpose that is 
common to both, which the child must learn to inaug- 


urate from within. Not the united wills of a nation of - 


people, or even of the whole world, are to be placed in 
absolute control of the will of an individual. Even when 
we, so to say, overthrow his will, we mean that the veto 
which we oppose to his immediate act does itself present 
the true interpretation of his will, if it were normally 
unfolded. And when, oppositely, the martyr willingly 
lays down his life it is with the conviction that, when the 
community that seeks to destroy him comes to itself, it 
will find that he has anticipated a moral advance it was 
destined to make. His very death, he believes, will 
effectuate his will in them some day. We see, then, that a 
mere individual could not be moral. For morality is con- 
stituted by the will to achieve the common good. 

A new insight is herewith obtained into our human 
relation to the material world in the midst of which we 
have our life. We have already pointed out that the 
world as viewed by us is instrumental to personality. 
But this is not to say that a personality comes to his true 
selfhood simply by appropriating the facts and forces in 
the material world as a means of satisfying his physical 
craving or in the way of guarding his physical safety as an 
individual. The supremely significant thing about the 
material world is the use that can be made of it as a 
medium by which men may come ever increasingly into 
communion with one another in purpose and practice. 
And the higher value of the marvellous mechanical inven- 
tions of our time lies in the fact that they are making the 
forces of the material world with astonishing rapidity 


THE BASIC AFFIRMATION 153 


instrumental to fuller human fellowship, a bond of the 
common life. The world is a ministrant to the communion 
of men with one another in the fuller personal life. 

Here we gain the clue to the discovery also of the higher 
personality. When one is found who bestows the wealth 
of his personality without stint upon all men, when he 
makes himself a means to their good by making his own 
good theirs, and when he seeks to make all things a 
‘medium for transferring his own self-consciousness to 
them, his is the personality that achieves for itself the 
highest place. He raises others to \his own high level 
when he reproduces in them the same high estimate which 
he has of himself and thereby makes them capable of the 
same high service as himself. This power of self-identifica- 
tion with others in order that they may become particip- 
ant in the inner power of one’s own being is what we 
mean by saviourhood. To verify this affirmation we have 
but to recall how the members of great human communi- 
ties have been content to see their history epitomized in 
the lives of their self-sacrificing heroes and heroines. 


III. THE CHRISTIAN HOPE OF SALVATION AS IT PRESENTS 
ITSELF TO THE HEART OF ONE WHO STANDS IN A 
SYMPATHETIC RELATION TO THE GREAT 
MOVEMENTS OF PROTESTANT LIFE 
IN OUR TIMES. 


1. The Christian faith affirms as its basic conviction the 
ultimate realization of the supreme worth of the personal. 
It utters itself most freely, not in the language of a phil- 
osophy of matter or spirit but in the language expressive 
of our conscious personal relations to one another. The 
mutual love and trust that founds the home, the tender- 


154 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


ness of parents and the responsive confidence of their 
children, the mutual affection and help of brothers and 
sisters, the loyalty of friend to friend—these convey 
most readily to the Christian heart the relations of the 
human with the divine. GOD IS PERSONALITY and 
he who knows the relations of one person with another 
need count himself no stranger to the life of the Most 
High. And the power that binds the votaries of this 
religion together is not found in a fixed law of conduct 
or body of doctrines but in a Personality, a Christ, in 
whom every seeking soul may find the answer to its 
longings. And as for the order, the institutions through 
which the higher personal life is initiated, what are they 
but the changing forms in which Christians have sought 
to promote the familiarity and interest in one another 
through which they become more fully aware of the pres- 
ence of One who is all in all. These personal associations 
and these alone, in the end, are the means of salvation. 

Accordingly, the Christian faith idealizes the human 
personality wherever found. Its attitude toward human- 
ity is ever hopeful, ‘‘never despairing” of raising every 
man to the higher life. Hence the Christian gives himself 
to the missionary endeavor unceasingly. 

2. Salvation, as a change of state, can be found only in 
the inner life of the person, not in anything external to it. 
It pertains not to one’s circumstances but to the self- 
setting of life. The Christian pictures of heaven and hell 
are dramatizations of the soul-quality of people. Salva- 
tion is not something to be given to one or taken away 
again. The recipient is never purely recipient but is 
himself active in the creation of that state. That which 
comes through communication from another is at the 


THE BASIC AFFIRMATION 155 


same time a personal attainment. It is no longer neces- 
sary for us to deny the freedom of the human will, like 
the early Protestant theologians, in order to magnify 
the grace of God as against the ‘‘good works” of the 
Catholics. Nor is it necessary to follow the Catholic 
distinction between God’s part and man’s part in the 
work of salvation. For in the free out-going of the human 
will toward its chosen end the divine grace itself is saving- 
ly at work. Salvation is communion with God. 

Strictly speaking, salvation is not-a “state” at all. A 
static condition would be an evil to personality, which is 
essentially active. Personal action is the only force we 
know at first hand. Progress is essential to well-being. 
Salvation is found in the unfolding of an ever-higher self- 
consciousness, in the attainment of an ever-worthier 
personal life and this can come to us in no other way than 
by the impartation to us of the dynamic of another 
personality. 

3. While the idea of salvation as commonly understood is 
specifically a religious idea, it 1s not to be regarded as, for 
that reason, essentially different from any other advance 
that may take place toward the better in our spiritual life. 
When there is a growth in intelligence, or acquisition of a 
greater measure of control over the forces of nature or our 
personal impulses, or such a development of the aesthetic 
quality of our nature as brings us into a higher apprecia- 
tion of the beauties and wonders of the universe, or an 
improvement of economic conditions or the social environ- 
ment, or a higher appreciation of the value of truth and 
justice, or a kindlier view generally of other persons— 
all these are of the nature of salvation, for in them all 
the human personality comes to the realization of a higher 


156 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


value in itself. It is not thereby decided which of these 
types of betterment is primary and fundamental and 
which derivative and secondary, but we may be assured 
that any doctrine of salvation that disparages the value 
of any one of these is defective. Whether there be a dis- 
tinctively Christian salvation or not depends on whether 
there comes, in. the state of mind that may be called 
distinctively Christian, a distinct increment to our 
personal worth, something that gives to life a value that 
is not found outside the Christian realm, whether, that is, 
the Christian experience is inclusive of all true benefits to 
men in their ultimate significance. The statement here 
offered in brief will receive further expansion in the chap- 
ters that follow. 


CHAPTER VIII 
SIN AND FORGIVENESS 


The normal course of human life is through conflict, a 
conflict of community with community, of individual 
with individual and of the man with himself. Even in the 
midst of hearty cooperation among men there is always 
some divergence of purpose, some measure-of disharmony. 
Conflict reaches its highest intensity and appears in its 
most awful form when nation is set against nation in mili- 
tary combat. But the peace that brings a war to its close 
is always a prelude to the disclosure of further difference, 
tension, and later conflict of some kind. All conflict issues 
from the opposition between cherished ideals. Whenever 
two communities are brought into contact a conflict of 
ideals is inevitable. For there is in humanity an irrevoc- 
able impulse toward the formation of one all-embracing 
community and the effort to accomplish this end is always 
associated with the emergence of differences needing re- 
conciliation. The basis of any true union is found in the 
acceptance of a common ideal. The conflicting ideals of 
communities reflect, and in turn are reflected by, the con- 
flicts between individuals and, again, by the conflicts that 
occur in the bosom of the man. 


I. THE MEANING OF SIN 


It is from the point of view indicated we can hope to 
understand the Christian conviction of sin and the as- 
surance of forgiveness. 


157 


158 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


1. In keeping with our method of interpretation in the 
discussion of other topics, here again we begin with the 
self-consciousness, the inner self-judgment of the man. That 
is, in a word, the Christian view of sin in general is such a_ 
view as the Christian may have of his own sin. He reflects 
his own self-judgment out upon the world of men and 
sees everywhere, in fact or in potency, the same kind of 
conflict as he finds in himself. Here we take it for granted 
that there is a Christian self-judgment, differing from that 
of the Jew, or the Mohammedan, or the Buddhist, and we 
shall see that this arises from the action within him of a 
distinctive ideal to whose commanding voice he cannot 
say nay. This ideal is the source of both his. highest hap- 
piness and his deepest woe. The self-conviction of sin is 
the obverse side of the acceptance of the higher ideal, that 
is, of the act of entering upon the pursuit of the better 
life. 

Let us turn our attention for a moment to a familiar 
concrete instance, in the Gospel story of Simon Peter’s 
denial of his Master. We note, first of all, the Master’s 
prediction of the faithless act and Peter’s instant horror 
of recoil at the prospect, with his hearty and emphatic 
asseveration of loyalty. Then follow the Master’s arrest, 
Peter’s attempt to defend him, and his self-exposure to 
danger by following his Beloved right into the court-room. 
Then come the thrice-repeated accusation that he is a 
companion of the Galilean and the thrice-repeated denial 
that he even knew the man. In a moment his eyes and the 
Master’s meet and his accusing conscience drives him 
from the room in an agony of tears. 

The situation depicted in the Gospels is entirely nat- 
ural. It exhibits the deep conflict of ideals which every 


SIN AND FORGIVENESS 159 


Christian experiences at times. On the one side was the 
action of the native instinct of self-preservation, a whole- 
some and worthful motive in us all. It was reinforced at 
the time by the spectacle he was witnessing and soon be- 
came dominant. There was the Innocent, the Lord, the 
Blessed One dragged before a heartless and cruel tribunal 
that was committed beforehand to pronounce upon him 
the sentence of death. Why should he himself become 
another victim to their wicked perversion of right and 
justice? Why should he assist a jealous and blood-thirsty 
hierarchy in their determination to carry out their bad 
desire to destroy their foes? It is well to live. It is good to 
seek to save one’s life. Neither the Jews of that time nor 
the people of any other time have been ready to condemn 
a man for telling a falsehood to save his life when he is 
exposed to danger at the hands of lying, wicked enemies. 
Peter’s tears are not to be taken directly as a sign of sor- 
row because of having told a falsehood to save his life but 
because of his conscious falsity to his new-found Ideal. I 
do not mean to say that he reflected consciously along the 
lines here indicated, for in such a fearful moment one’s 
mind works with lightning-like rapidity and leaps to con- 
clusions by means that only reflective thought can trace, 
but the situation was as I have described. 

Over against the influences I have mentioned there 
were impulses of a contrary nature working in Peter’s 
mind, though very dimly at the instant. There was his 
genuine love for his Master and his determination never 
to forsake him. There was his sympathy for the accused 
and the desire to be near to help, if possible, in that terri- 
ble hour. There was the daring devotion that led him 
right into the scene of danger for love’s sake. The glance 


160 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


of the Master’s eye, without a word, or sign, or look of 
warning or distrust, so far as we can tell, flung back into 
Peter’s mind the sense of the worth of Jesus to him. The 
hours and days and months spent with Jesus, the tender 
mutual confidence between them, the new standards of 
life, the new aspirations, the new hopes he had gained of 
the coming in of the kingdom of goodness and purity and 
peace—with the Master’s glance it all flashed back into 
the heart of Peter. How mean and low all self-seeking 
became in Jesus’ presence! How vile and worthless so 
many things that once seemed well worth the having! 
How sinful the very best in one’s past was seen to be, in 
the presence of such as He! How repulsive the pride that 
lurked in his own confident professions of loyalty! How 
quickly, in the mind of such a one, does the pang of 
bitter regret take the place of the satisfaction and self- 
congratulation with which a successful evasion would 
have filled his mind but for the contact with that Higher 
Spirit! What might have seemed meritorious to one who 
had never come under the mastership of the new Ideal is 
turned into demerit in the presence of the demands of this 
law of the higher life. Thus must it ever be. He who con- 
veys to men’s hearts the power of a worthier purpose 
becomes by that very achievement the author in them of 
a deeper and more acute sense of sin. 

2. This is how it comes about that the Christian has a 
constant awareness of sin within. For the Christian faith 
comes to men not as a formally complete and final law, 
not as a fixed standard of conduct, but as a quality of life 
that cannot perish. The standard rises to a new and higher 
level with every new spiritual advance the Christian 
makes. By comparison with the new the old is sin, and 


SIN AND FORGIVENESS 161 


every time he follows the old rather than the new he 
commits an act of sin. There is no man who feels within 
him both the longing for the better life and the working of 
the propensities and habits which have been developed 
under the power of the older life but is aware of the will 
to evil within. If the Christian ideal of life is identical 
with Jesus Christ and if it has been propagated from him 
out into the Christian world, then itis\true that his very 
gift of a saving ideal contains withinitself the gift also of 
a personal conviction of sin. One cannot be Savior with- 
out becoming Judge.’ 

It is evident, therefore, that a Christian consciousness 
of sin does not precede the exercise of Christian faith in 
the soul but accompanies it and is inseparable from it. 
Consequently, in the Christian message there is no effort 
made to produce a consciousness of sin apart from the 
exercise of saving faith or as a preparation for it but only 
such a consciousness of sin as can be an element in this 
faith. The Christian faith is not expressed in the terms of 
a law that kills but in the terms of a law that gives life. 
The sense of sin has no value in itself. The habit of morbid 
reflection on one’s sins which has been cultivated in some 
quarters is unchristian and, so far from leading to a gen- 
uine humility of spirit, tends to hypocrisy. 

It is also evident that the Christian consciousness of 
sin has not in it the quality of hopelessness but just the 
reverse. To say, “I am a sinner,” is truly to say that I 
_have within me a better self that repudiates the old self— 
that, to use the words of Paul, I have ‘‘put off the old man 
and have put on the new man that is being constantly 


1We may remark in passing that this suggests the element of permanent Christ- 
‘ian significance in the expectation of a second persona! advent of Jesus to rule and 
judge mankind. Disrobed of the unchristian Jewish features popularly attached, it 
stands for the conviction of the ultimate vindication of the ideal of life that is found 
in the personality of Jesus. 


162 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


renewed in the image of its creator.’”’ To be able to pro- 
nounce on myself such a judgment implies the possession 
of a lofty quality of moral discernment and a purity of 
purpose that can come to one in no other way than by. 
being participant in the life that is divine. He who lacks 
~ the feeling that he is sinful is surely devoid of that high 
sense of personal worth that carries with it the certainty 
of imperishability. He who possesses it is already aware of 
an inward exaltation that enables him to repudiate his 
own evil deeds as unworthy of himself in his true character. 
3. It follows that the attempt to determine the meta- 
physical nature of sin must be futile. The term, “‘nature,”’ 
often covers a multitude of theological errors. To speak of 
the nature of a thing is to refer to its place in the whole 
order of things. But sin is the negation of the true order, 
the recalcitrancy that leaves the true order unrealized. 
Sin is the negation of the higher righteousness, the want of 
the higher good. As soon as we try to identify it with some 
particular impulse or passion, or some particular aim or 
purpose standing by itself, we find that we have named 
something that under certain circumstances is necessary. 
Evil zs but only in relation to the good and can be known 
to be evil only when the higher good has come into view. 
If, for example, senswousness be called sin, we find dis- 
credit put upon a quality of our constitution without 
which we men of body and soul would be something other 
than men—and it is good to be men, to possess appetites 
of sense and to have regard to them. Or if it be said that 
sin is constituted by selfishness, can we mean that sin- 
lessness consists in having no regards for one’s self? Sin 
is not an isolable fact in the world. The consciousness of 


SIN AND FORGIVENESS 163 


sin is the fact that now concerns us and we find it mean- 
ingless apart from the consciousness of the better life. 
This it is that gives to sin its serious character. 

4, There can be no history of sin in atself. The story of 
the sins that men commit, of the evils of which they are 
guilty, is a part of the story of the struggle for the better 
life and apart from this it has no meaning. The history of 
the world, from the Christian point*-of view, is the story 
of this struggle. It is the story of the effort to transcend a 
good already attained by the attainment of a higher good. 
It is the story of the conflict between the less worthy and 
the more worthy purposes of the hearts of men or, in the 
community-relation, between those who hold to the 
former and those who hold to the latter. If we adopt the 
Augustinian conception of the existence of two mutually 
exclusive kingdoms of the world, the kingdom of God and 
the kingdom of the devil, or the kingdom of evil and the 
kingdom of grace, each of which develops its character 
with growing momentum as the ages pass till the bitter 
and exterminating struggle comes to an end by the extinc- 
tion of one of these kingdoms, we must remember that 
this theory is an idealization of the facts. There are no 
institutions exclusively bad or exclusively good, but evil 
and good are in all. The same is true of individuals. In 
the life of humanity it is the strength of an ancient good 
that stands most dangerously in the way of the new. 

The truth of the whole matter may be stated in a para- 
dox. The power of an evil lies in the good from which it 
has sprung. Evil is perverted good. Good that, in the pres- 
ence of a higher good, is still adhered to as the highest be- 
comes evil. Sinning occurs when one seeks to be satisfied 
with a former good that is now become inferior to a prof- 


164 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


ered good not anticipated before. For example, the 
building up of a nation, with homogeneity of spirit in its 
citizens, enjoying continuity of territory and possession 
of material power, is an achievement of great worth. It. 

~ can come about only by the widening of the earlier mental 
horizon of its people and the breaking down of the narrow- 
ness and mutual antipathy of forms of their earlier tribal 
life, so that they become welded together in the pursuit of 
larger common aims. The spirit of nationalism and its 
embodiment in institutions suited to its nature marks a 
notable victory over those disintegrating forces that, left 
unchecked, would reduce the public life to a lower po- 
tency. But this very nationalism, if it be set.in opposition 
to that humanitarian spirit that knows no gradation of 
rights among men but foresees all the nations of the earth 
as a family united in mutual love and service, may be- 
come a fearful menace to human welfare. For, when it be- 
comes dominant, it produces wars of aggression, reducing 
happy peoples to want, and turning their homes into 
scenes of desolation. Then to set up nationalism as an aim 
of supreme worth is to consecrate a community-selfish- 
ness as a holy thing and to repudiate the principle of 
universal and equal love—a capital offense in the eye of 
the Christian. The positive good embodied in nationalism 
may become a source of the vilest malignity. Devotion to 
it becomes, in that case, a sin against humanity. 

The struggle for the higher good is to go on from age to 
age in the life of humanity as it is to go on from day to day 
in the life of the man—and just because it is the life of a 
man that is being lived by each one. We must not expect 
the consciousness of sin to die down in the human heart. 


SIN AND FORGIVENESS 165 


For it is the reverse side of the consciousness of the good 
yet to be fully attained. 


II. THE CAUSES OF SINNING 


In our treatment of this subject we have found that our 
thoughts, beginning with the inner self-judgment of the 
man, have turned to the course of human-affairs in general. 
It has seemed as if the question of the deliverance of any 
man from the bondage to evil within must be insoluble 
apart from the deliverance of our whole humanity from 
evil. We find this supposition confirmed when we turn 
our attention to the mental state called ‘“‘repentance.”’ 

1. The account which the average man would give of some 
act of his which he now regrets, if he speaks unaffectedly, 
would be purely empirical. He speaks regretfully of a past 
deed for which he blames himself directly. Perchance he 
did not recognize the wrong in it until after it was done. 
Under a given set of circumstances, with or without 
prompting from another, under the play of personal de- 
sire or the force of some uncontrolled passion, he did the 
the deed which, in the light of its consequences or of a 
clearer view of the whole situation, he now condemns and 
wishes it had been left undone. 

The listener, desiring further light on the penitent’s 
state of mind both at the time the act was committed and 
at the present moment, might ask two questions: First, 
How came the impulse you speak of or the incitement 
from without to have so much influence over your will? 
Secondly, Were you the solitary perpetrator of the deed 
or were others implicated with you in the act? The answer 
_ to the first question involves an examination of the mo- 


166 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


tive of the deed, that is, the aim held, perhaps, only half- 
consciously in the mind. The answer to the second in- 
volves a study of his affiliations. The two answers point 
—in a single direction. | 

It will be seen at once that the deed was no mere ac- 
cident in the man’s life. No stray impulse, no sudden up- 
rising of a fleeting passion, no suggestion by another could 
alone have led to it. The significant thing is that the set 
of his mind, shaped under the play of many influences in 
earlier days came into action and to clear light in his act. 
It was such a deed as a man with such a life behind him 
would surely commit under the same circumstances. As 
he reflects on his deed it comes about that it is not so 
much the particular act as the state of mind which event- 
uated in the act that troubles him so sorely. It is himself 
that troubles him. 

Our penitent might not care to answer the second ques- 
tion but the enquirer must press it. Was he never a mem- 
ber of a family or of some other group that under certain 
conditions encouraged deeds of this kind? If now he re- 
pudiates such acts will he not place himself in an unfriend- 
ly relation to these persons? That is, does not the act 
represent the character of a human community? Is any 
sinner, indeed, an absolute anarchist? Is he an alien to 
mankind? In his sinning has he set his will against the 
collective will of the whole of humanity? There can be 
but one answer:—Most certainly not. The attraction of 
another person or other persons was operative in his will. 
To this degree his act was a community act. This would 
have made it hard for him to refrain from the act, had 
he wished to do so. To refuse at the time or to renounce it 
afterwards would be to pronounce a judgment of condem- 


SIN AND FORGIVENESS Paty 


nation upon that community. The wonder is that he 
should repent at all. The answer to both questions is to 
the effect that the set of his mind that determined his 
deed is a community inheritance. The original sin lies 
there. So long as he remains in this community-life he re- 
mains a sinner. Its common life, in this. aspect, is a2 com- 
munion in sin. In reality, however, the discovery of the 
origin of any deed is a very complicated study. The long 
perpetuated habits of mind and of physical action through 
evolutionary processes in great communities, the organi- 
zation of society in support of these, the legislative enact- 
ments and court decisions looking toward the perpetuity 
and prosperity of communities, the cross-influences from 
many other communities within or without the larger 
community—these and a multitude of untraceable influ- 
ences have been united in the perpetration of any single 
deed we may mention. So then, when it comes to passing 
judgment on a single deed of wrong we find that the 
original of it lies out there in a vast human realm beyond 
our power to know fully. 

2. Yet at the same time tt 1s true that every man’s deeds 
are different from those of any other personality or of all 
others combined, if such a combination of persons were possi- 
ible. The indefinable and incalculable number of social 
influences that are constitutive of the character of his act 
are fused in his personality and stamped by his personal 
volition. That precise act had never been done, and could 
never have been done, by another. The community sin 
takes on a modification of its character through his initia- 
tive. He is right in focussing his mind upon his own re- 
sponsibility and saying, ‘‘I, and I alone, am the sinner.” 
Short of this his repentance means nothing but an eva- 


168 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


sion. It is the moral consciousness of the man that pro- 
duces a modification of the moral consciousness of the 
community. The community consciousness is never stat- 
ic. It is constantly under process of modification through 
the self-directed action of the man. If, therefore, the com- 
munity makes the man, the man also remakes the com- » 
munity. In order to find any meaning in the community 
life it is necessary that we discover the character of the 
inner conscious life of the man. 

In consequence, we find our surest guide to the under- 
standing of the meaning of sin, not in the crimes de- 
nounced in the laws of the civil state, not in the prohibi- 
tive maxims or conventions of society, not in the heresies 
condemned by the church, not in the list of misdeeds that 
involve a breach of her discipline; but in the medita- 
tions, confessions, longings and prayers of great souls. 
The fifty-first psalm, the Pauline recitals of the deeds of a 
misdirected life, the retractations of an Augustine, the 
penitential cries of some hymnist like him who wrote, 
“Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee,’”’— 
these shall teach us. Who is it then that fully knows an- 
other’s sin? Who can make due confession for another? 
In all awareness of sin there is a sense of loneliness—‘‘God 
be merciful to me, the sinner.” 

So it is my prerogative to pronounce judgment on my- 
self. None other knows or can know the range of my moral 
dearth. None other can know the depth of my moral in- 
famy. The judgment of others is likely to be too lenient 
and, if I accept it as my own, I am likely to be deterred 
from entering upon that higher life for which my sense of 
Sin is a preparation and of which it is really a prophecy. 


SIN AND FORGIVENESS 169 


Again, I say, it is my prerogative to call myself a/ sinner, 
since that very self-judgment is really a reflex of the 
higher life upon which already I, the sinner, am entering. 
The consciousness of sin is sree in Pauensy, the knowl- 
edge of forgiveness. | = 
| 
III. THE MEANING OF FORGIVENESS 


The foregoing discussion of the consciousness of sin 
supplies the point of view from which the question of the 
forgiveness of sins is to be treated. At the outset we are 
confronted with a series of somewhat complicated doc- 
trinal formulations which grew up in the midst of the 
controversies between Protestants and Catholics and 
were further developed by the controversies among Pro- 
testants themselves. In these controversies the terms, 
Atonement, Justification, Forgiveness, Reconciliation, 
Sanctification are continually in use. They are commonly 
treated, not as synonyms, but as representing an organ- 
ized body of truths respecting the way of salvation, truths 
made known to men by explicit information from God. 
The matter has already been referred to in an earlier chap- 
ter of this work. At this point we cannot enter upon a de- 
tailed discussion of this great subject but must limit our 
attention to the heart of it all, which is found in the idea 
of forgiveness. We cannot regard the above terms as pre- 
senting really separate facts. They are all figurative, met- 
aphors representing from various standpoints the one 
great spiritual fact, the fact, namely, that each one of us 
who enters upon the better life does so by virtue of a com- 
munication to our hearts of the gracious divine will. To 
lose sight of this is to expose oneself to the danger of sub- 


170 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


stituting the acceptance of a theoretical system for the 
heart-experience without which all such systems are but 
cobwebs of the brain. 

1. The reality of the forgiveness of our sins and of the 
eternal worth of this experience supplies the basis of all 
theories of atonement, justification, sanctification, and re- 
conciliation. In the idea of Atonement, recourse is had to 
the practice of priestly mediation as a means of securing 
release from the consequences of our misdeeds. In the 
idea of Justification, recourse is had to the methods of 
political jurisprudence as a means of securing the safety 
of the state and the well-being of its subjects against the 
menace of criminality. In the idea of Sanctification, re- 
course is had to the purificatory ceremonies by which 
people have sought to purge themselves from the moral or 
ceremonial filth they have contracted. In the idea of Re- 
conciliation, recourse is had to the idea of the mediating 
mutual friend who brings two estranged friends back to 
mutual trust and love. In the idea of Forgiveness, re- 
course is had to the familiar and deeply cherished remem- 
brance of the graciousness of one whom we have wronged 
—graciousness in bestowing undeserved kindness upon us 
to win us away from our wrong-doing and to bring us to 
share the wealth of goodness in his own heart. They are 
all valuable metaphorical representations of the manner 
in which the conscience, when burdened with the sense of 
one’s personal misdoing, is relieved from the sense of 
failure and helplessness and filled with a new sense of 
personal worth and of strength for achievements hitherto 
unattempted and impossible. We prefer to begin with the 
idea of forgiveness because it seems to bring us the near- 
est to the actual experiences of our common life. 


SIN AND FORGIVENESS Wee bal 


We have tried to show what is meant by a confession of 
sin. We have tried to show the far-reaching implications 
of this confession in that it involves an outreach into vast 
realms of human life that eventuates in the discovery that 
every man’s sin becomes ultimately race-wide in its con- 
nections. Forgiveness must have implications as broad. 
Forgiveness is so great an act that reverent men have held 
that God only can perform this deed. They have hoped in 
this way to guard the divine prerogative and at the same 
time to guard men against the temptation to belittle the 
deed or make it subsidiary to the purposes of institutional 
systems. In this aim they were right, but at the same time 
they obscured the fact that it is just in the communica- 
tion of the grace that is in one human heart to another’s 
heart that the divine grace is operative. 

The idea of forgiveness, then, relates to a very common 
human experience. As was intimated in the opening 
chapter of this work, the experience of forgiving another or 
of being forgiven by him is an event familiar to us all. It 
is along this road we travel when we seek to make the 
higher life our aim. Salvation comes by way of forgive- 
ness. This is the way of betterment for all mankind. The 
alternative is, on the one side, persistence in the wrong- 
doing, aggravation of the injury by new acts of the same 
character, and, on the other side, resentment and retalia- 
tion, until the venom of these two hearts spreads through 
their whole life, works like a foul infection into the life of 
the community in which they inhere and thence is carried 
out into the life of mankind. In the end we shall find that 
there are no other alternatives than these. 

2. What, then, is it that really occurs when one person 

forgives another? In the first place, there is a full recogni- 


172 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


tion of the character and gravity of the offense. To fail of 
this would be to come short of realizing the depth of the 
inward relation of man to man and the dependence of 
each on each. The sin that has been committed is a viola- 
tion of that holy bond and carries with it the befouling of 
our mutual spiritual life. There is no telling how far the 
infection may spread or the human ruin it may work. It 
is, therefore, a matter of profound concern to the offended 
one. He cannot ignore the act. Such an attitude would 
carry with it a dereliction of duty toward humanity itself. 
To say that I can ignore the offense, that I can simply let 
it go as of no account, is to say that I am permitted to 
ignore my fellowman’s state of mind as unworthy of my 
attention. That would be the same as to encourage an at- 
titude of contempt toward him. I should then become the 
worse offender. Instead, I must seek to penetrate into the 
heart of his life, to find what it is that, working in his 
mind, led him to the perpetration of this deed. I must 
trace his inheritance, as was indicated in the earlier por- 
tion of this chapter, that I may know his handicap. I 
place myself by sympathy in his place and think of him 
as I would think of myself in such a condition. At length 
I feel as if his burden were mine, his sin my own. The 
guilt, the badness, the pain, the agony of it drive me to 
seek to save him. I now feel coming upon me demands 
such as I never knew before. Life has taken on a profound 
seriousness, a deeper meaning, a richer character. It is 
now more truly worth the living at the same time that it 
has become the harder to live. 

In the second place, zn the act of forgiveness, there is the 
communication to the sinner of the state of mind of the one 
sinned against. No formal acquittal, no pronouncement 


J 


SIN AND FORGIVENESS ewes 


of legal justness would be of any use to him or/any satis- 
faction to me, the wronged one. My aim is to have him see 
things as I see them, to pass on his act the same judgment 
as I pass. For, otherwise, I should leave him in spirit 
where he was before. I must seek to bring him into the 
secret of my life, to animate his bosom with aims like 
mine, to lead him to appreciate the things that seem 
worthful to me. This means that I must seek to awaken in 
- him smitings of conscience, agonies of repentance, with 
the mingled sense of defeat and hope thereby involved— 
by whatever necessary means this may be brought about. 
I must communicate my very selfhood to him. Thus I give 
myself to him and for him. I am become his servant. My 
- soul goes for his. I am become his savior. We are now in 
fellowship with each other. A new and higher communion 
of spirit has been established. I live in him, he lives in me. 
He is forgiven. 

From that day onward a new field of common action 
lies before us. For his heart and mine are now wide open to 
the needs of the men and women who shared his inher- 
itance—and mine. Our human inheritance has caused the 
offense to abound but cannot grace be made to abound 
the more exceedingly? There rises in prospect a new 
world. I need, he needs that new world. The newly awak- 
ened capabilities of my spirit reach out to the regions be- 
yond and I picture to myself an era to come when all man- 
kind shall know the grace of forgiveness. Therewith shall 
my own need be satisfied. For I too have been an offender 
in many ways and I find now flowing into my soul those 
rich streams of graciousness which other hearts have 
sought to communicate to me as they also saw my sin, 
just as I saw my fellowman’s. 


174 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


In the third place, 7n the very act of forgiving another I am 
become a recipient of good from him. In seeking to forgive 
him I am attempting to communicate to him the secret of 
that higher life into which I have entered. Whatever 
degree of blame or worthiness I may see in him, it is im- 
possible, on the other hand, to ignore his right to partici- 
pate in whatever worth I may possess without at the same 
time losing in some degree the sense of my own personal 
worth to other men. There is no gainsaying his claims upon 
me, though he may not be aware of them. 

But obstacles arise. We occupy different spiritual areas. 
Our interests are alien. Our mutual understanding is im- 
peded by the difference between our respective inherit- 
ances. The state of each of our minds has a history behind 
it. Each pertains to a spiritual community to which the 
other is a kind of stranger. My task turns out to be some- 
thing more serious than that of transferring him to the 
community to which I belong. That entire community in 
which he inheres claims my efforts. It must be recreated 
in a new character. 

I soon find him making unexpected demands upon me. 
Resources of my nature that were never before in requisi- 
tion are now summoned into action. Virtues and defects 
hitherto unsuspected in my character are disclosed. I find 
myself reaching out for help the moment I try to help 
him. The patience, kindliness, generosity, faithfulness and 
sympathy that I have seen in others I now long to possess 
in myself. How humiliated I feel as time after time I fail 
to reach the heart of this fellowman of mine. But new 
accessions of power continually come. In the end I have 
communicated my mind to him. I have won him. And 
what an increment of good has hereby become mine! 


SIN AND FORGIVENESS : 175 


It is not merely that my inherent resources are raised 
to a higher worth. I have become a beneficiary of his. 
There are qualities in him that attract me. I find that he 
has been made the more approachable through the com- 
munity of influences that have worked in him. I now enter 
a larger community life than before and my faith takes on 
a correspondingly larger meaning. In forgiving him I have 
received forgiveness beyond anything that came to me 
before I forgave him. I see a new meaning in the words of 
Jesus: “If ye forgive men their trespasses your heavenly 
Father will forgive your trespasses, but if ye forgive not 
men their trespasses neither will your Father forgive you 
yours.” 

One also thinks here of the words of Paul, ‘‘Where sin 
abounded grace hath abounded the more exceedingly.” 
For through the very fact that one man has sinned against 
another and the other has requited it by efforts to impart 
to the offender a state of mind like his own, which will 
prevent him from repeating the offense, both are led into 
a higher, richer, truer spiritual life than they knew before. 
The forgiven is made to know a power of betterment that 
was alien to his former experiences. Account for it as we 
may, the fairest flowers of goodness that flourish in the 
human bosom blossom on a soil where personal wrongs 
have invaded the sacred private territory of a fellow man. 
When one had sinned against the other and been for- 
given freely by him there is discovered a depth of love and 
wealth of fellowship between men that never comes to the 
knowledge of those whose spirits have never passed 
through such a testing. Perhaps our shell-shocked world 
may turn out to be but the vestibule to a temple whose 


176 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


doors could never have been entered by us had we not 
lived in just such a world, with all its sin and sorrow. 

3. We have been treating of forgiveness as though it were 
an exercise of grace from man to man. And so it is. We 
know of no other way in which it comes to light and this 
human forgiveness is identical with the divine. What is to 
hinder that it be so? If divine forgiveness were something 
quite different, how could it become known to us? Is it 
added to the human to make it complete? But in what 
manner can it be added if not in the human way? That 
startling utterance ascribed to Jesus, ‘‘Whosesoever sins 
you forgive, they are forgiven to them; whosesoever sins 
you retain they are retained,’ has been the occasion of 
much controversy because the utterance has been given 
an official rather than a personal application. Here again, 
institutionalism has perverted a great truth and obscured 
the way to the better life. Protestantism also has erred in 
this respect by institutionalizing their application, though 
in a different direction. For we are not to think of forgive- 
ness as the ordered and pre-determined result of the suc- 
cessful execution of a ‘“‘plan of salvation’? but as the 
actual, every-day exercise on the part of the common man 
of a gracious, purifying, personal influence upon those 
who wrong their fellowmen. We know no other way. 

That grace in me by which I am enabled to lift my err- 
ing fellowman into a sphere of life where his former sins 
can have a place no more, came to me as a divine endow- 
ment in my spirit. But it came to me in no independence 
of my fellowman. It came down through the ages and 
generations to me, being constantly enriched in its course 
through the new exercise of it by each one who has for- 


SIN AND FORGIVENESS 177 


given another, till the tiny streamlet from a far-off foun- 
tain has swollen into a mighty flood of divine goodness 
broadening out over the life of our humanity. 

4. This one great, age-long forgiving act bears for us who 
are Christians the name of Jesus Christ. We are not now 
thinking of an official relation he is supposed to bear to us 
but we see revealed in his personality as it is set forth in 
the New Testament and as it fulfils itself in the Christian 
communion through the centuries, the quality of mind 
that is to achieve this longed-for end. This is “‘the grace 
that was in our Lord Jesus Christ.”’ It is He who gave it 
the momentum with which it has passed down to us to- 
day and is taking possession of the world. 

In the end we know no other “‘means” of salvation. 
Some have set up definite acts or rites and others definite 
doctrines as divinely instituted means of bringing this 
grace to men. None can deny that men have found at 
times some act or doctrine an instrument for awakening 
the soul to an awareness of this divine activity in the 
world of men. None can forbid the use of them, but none 
of these instruments is indispensable. The only immedi- 
ately effective means of salvation, after all, is the free 
communion of spirit with spirit, the impingement of per- 
sonality upon personality, the revealing of the secret of 
one heart to another, wherever it may take place. The 
free mingling of men on the great highways of life, the 
trade and barter of the market place, the common strug- 
gle to make the forces of nature ministrant to human 
good, the attack and defense on the field of battle, the 
love and light of the fireside and the social circle, the 
public assembly for worship—all these and a thousand 
others are as truly means of salvation as the most sacred 


178 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


rites of the hallowed place. The whole world is a Christian 
sanctuary and every common thing can be turned into an 
instrument to reveal the soul of the Christ that died for 
human sin because through all these the grace that is in 
one heart may flow into another, bringing forgiveness and 
peace. None, indeed, can forgive sins but God. But this 
gift is bestowed through the natural human intercourse. 
The kingdom of God is in our world and the ideal earth 
is identical with heaven. 

To bring our discussion to a summary conclusion :— 
The truly awful character of sin is manifest when we 
perceive that he who commits it pertains in spirit to a 
community life, reaching far back in time and stretching 
over vast areas of space, and that his sin is rooted 
in the massed will of that community. A communion 
in evil has to be confronted when the sin of any man 
meets us. The question of his salvation becomes at length 
the question of transferring him from the bosom of the 
community constituted by their common allegiance to an 
ideal inferior in its worth over to the bosom of a commun- 
ity constituted by a common allegiance to a new and 
higher ideal. The battle between sin and grace resolves 
itself into a conflict between the lower and higher com- 
munity life. The very loyalty of men to the lower com- 
munity becomes an impediment to the realization of the 
higher, even if that lower kingdom is relatively high when 
compared with a still lower. THE VETO TO PROGRESS 
TOWARD THE BETTER—THAT IS SIN. WHEN WE SAY THAT 
SIN IS AGAINST GOD WE MEAN THAT THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
ANY OFFENSE AGAINST THE WORTHFUL LIES IN ITS OPPO- 
SITION TO AND REPUDIATION OF THE ONE SUPREME PER- 
SONALITY WHO IS THE ETERNAL PRINCIPLE OF THE HIGHER 


SIN AND FORGIVENESS 179 


COMMUNION, IN WHOM ALL THE GOOD THERE IS FOR US IS 
PERSONALLY FULFILLED, THE ALONE GOOD BECAUSE HE IS 
BOTH SOURCE AND AIM OF ALL GOOD IN US. 

AND FORGIVENESS OF SINS IS JUST THE ACTION OF THIS 
PERFECT GOODNESS ACTUALIZING ITSELF IN OUR HUMAN- 
ITY WHEN ONE WHO IS NEARER TO HIM IMPARTS THAT SAME 
GOODNESS TO ONE WHO IS FARTHER AWAY AND LIFTS HIM 
INTO A NEW AND HIGHER COMMUNION WITH GOD. THE 
CHARACTER OF THIS DIVINE GOODNESS IS REVEALED TO US 
IN THE VICARIOUS SELF-GIVING OF JESUS CHRIST IN HIS 
LIFE AND IN HIS DEATH FOR MEN. BELIEVE IN HIM AND THOU 
SHALT BE SAVED. 


CHAPTER Ix 
ATONEMENT 


The idea of Atonement has been in common use among 
Christians for a long time. It is indicative of the strong in- 
fluence which the scriptures of the Old Testament have 
had on our thinking. It frequently occurs in the priestly 
literature, particularly in those portions of the Mosaic 
legislation where the law of sacrifices for the removal of 
the consequences of sin is laid down. In the single in- 
stance of the occurrence of the word in the King James 
version of the new Testament .*—‘‘ We also rejoice in God 
through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom we have 
now received the atonement’’—it is now displaced by the 
term reconciliation, which more correctly expresses the 
writer’s meaning. However, even if the term itself is lack- 
ing in our present New Testament, the idea is there, 
particularly in the epistle to the Hebrews and at points in 
the other books where the salvation of Jesus Christ is set 
forth under the form of priestly action. Naturally enough, 
both on account of the influence of the portions of the 
New Testament that employ the language of sacrifice and 
also on account of the large place which priestly interces- 
sion and the ritual of sacrifice have had in shaping the life 
and thought of Christians in ancient and medieval times, 
the term and the ideas associated with it have a large place 
in the common usage and thought of many persons in 
modern times. It is still, perhaps, the most convenient 
mode of representing the significance of the death of 

1Rom, 5:11 





180 


ATONEMENT 181 


Jesus Christ. In the imagery of our hymns and prayers 
he is still pictured as the victim offered in sacrifice to God 
in order that the sins of men may be remitted and the 
divine wrath against them removed. 

In the Calvinist doctrine, which is typically Protes- 
tant, Atonement commonly relates to action in the sphere 
of law and especially criminal law. Conformably, the 
relation between God and men is represented as estab- 
lished by legislative enactment on the part of God, the 
one Supreme Legislator. As the ruin of mankind came 
through the violation of positive law and the sentence of 
condemnation that justly followed, so also their salvation 
can some not otherwise than through the due vindication 
of the purpose of the law by a Mediator who interposes 
his action on their behalf. Whether or no this representa- 
tion may tend to make those who accept it profoundly 
moral persons or merely formal legalists will depend a 
good deal on the degree to which their own inner life has 
been controlled by a due appreciation of the worth of their 
_own and all others’ personality. Now, it is indisputable 
that one of the mightiest forces at work today reshaping 
the forms of human government in the direction of great- 
er humaneness is just this growing sense of personal worth 
in all men. That is to say, the character and the forms of 
government are being reconstructed from within. Accord- 
ingly, the spirit and the method of the divine govern- 
ment must be reinterpreted from this newer point of view 
if it is to be construed as serving the needs of men. If, then, 
the way of salvation may be truly represented in keep- 
ing with the highest conception of government now in 
vogue, a new interpretation of atonement must follow. 


182 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


I. MODERN CONCEPTION OF GOVERNMENT 


We observe the change in the modern Christian’s 
way of conceiving his relation to God as compared with | 
the view that prevailed in the days of the Reforma- 
tion. In those days God was conceived mainly as Law- 
giver, Sovereign and Judge of men, inasmuch as he was 
their Creator and the Creator of all things. His will was 
absolute, indisputable and irresistible. It was disclosed to 
men only in so far as he was pleased to make it known to 
them. His alone were the rights, theirs alone the responsi- 
bilities. He was Lord, they were subjects. His uttered will 
was the revealed law of their lives. By his decree the 
violation of his will on the part of his subjects brought 
condemnation upon them. Condemnation involved pun- 
ishment eternal. The wrath of God came inevitably on all 
sinners. Accordingly, the way of salvation was to be found 
only in some deed that would satisfy divine justice. The 
terror of a broken law drove men to seek deliverance from 
its penalty. Such a conception of government, human or 
divine, is alien to our present democratic views of the civil 
life. 

1. When the common unsophisticated Protestant 
Christian of the present day who is untrained in the tradi- 
tional modes of theological speculation just referred to, 
thinks of his relation to God and especially of the errors 
and shortcomings of his past life, he is troubled, not by 
the thought of the sentence imposed by the Supreme 
Court of heaven but rather by the thought of the wrongs 
he has done to others as well as himself. The meaning of 
his misdeeds lies in their violation of the holyand gracious 
character of the Chiefest Friend of all men, his God. His 


ATONEMENT 183 


wrong relation to God is discovered in his wrong relation 
to men. These two are inseparable. It is the evil outcome 
in himself and in them as persons that gives him pain, 
whether he looks to the present or to the future. This is 
the direction in which his conscience works. The fear of 
the punishment to be inflicted by an inexorable Judge 
does not especially concern him. If he believes that he 
deserves punishment and must meet it, (as we may well 
conceive he does) he will accept it willingly and endure it 
as bravely and uncomplainingly as he may. His thoughts 
do not turn particularly to a hell of suffering in a world to 
come after death and he is not greatly moved by the 
threats of it, as the preachers well know. As to a suffering 
for wrong-doing, he thinks that the man who endures it 
courageously, when he deserves it, is a much better man 
than he who seeks to escape his deserts. He would scorn 
to accept deliverance solely at another’s cost and he feels 
that anyone who sought to appease his conscience by as- 
suring him that the punishment which was his due was no 
longer awaiting him because another has borne it in his 
stead, would be offering to him an indignity which every 
true man must resent. He does not seek a salvation which 
requires the sacrifice of his self-respect. As for a provision 
made for some in order that they may escape, while others 
bear their own punishment, no being who practiced such 
favoritism could possibly win his allegiance or respect. 
The fact is that this manner of representing his relation to 
God and the means of securing his own personal well-being 
seems to him very artificial and unnatural. He feels no 
disposition to discuss the questions which these concep- 
tions of man’s relation to God formerly forced upon the 
attention of thoughtful Christian people. A different 


184 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


series of conceptions is much more natural to his mind. 
For example, he is conscious of sinning in that he has 
failed to live up to his privileges and has chosen the lower, 
meaner, more selfish way of living and acting when a 
higher and better way was plainly before him. Again, it is 
not the external consequences which a Supreme Power 
has attached to his deeds that alarms him, that gives him 
so much concern, but the deeds themselves and the habit 
of mind which they display and cultivate. And when he 
pictures to himself the true type of a human life as he sees 
it in Jesus Christ and feels that this is the revelation of 
God’s mind, it is the persistent alienation of his own mind 
that alarms him and begets contrition of spirit. Accord- 
ingly, the modern evangelistic summons, ‘‘Get right with 
God,’’ does not mean that men are to seek a desirable 
legal standing with God, but that they are to seek to at- 
tain to a purpose and practice of life that are in harmony 
with the divine will. To get right with God is, to the 
modern Christian, to enter into a truly moral life, a life 
that God approves, yes, the life that God lives. What else 
can a righteous life mean after all? For a merely formal 
righteousness, for a freedom from legal condemnation 
that is not based on a state of mind and action of the 
will in unity with the holy will of God, good men care 
nothing. Such a “righteousness” would be a mockery of 
real goodness. 

2. If, then, a modern man under Christian influence 
prays for righteousness he never has in mind the desirabil- 
ity of being simply “let go,’’ when the consequences of his 
misdeeds come into question; neither has he in mind the 
discovery of some “‘plan of salvation’? by which he can be 
released from subjection to punishment while he is still 


ATONEMENT 185 


far from pure and holy. Righteousness gets its meaning 
for him from those human relations in which one man 
acts towards another as he ought to do, that is, in a truly 
moral manner. Or when one person who has been wronged 
by another succeeds in bringing the offender into a state 
of mind in which he repudiates with sorrow his own act 
with the result that right relations between them are re- 
stored, the offender has become righteous. The wronged 
one is now able to extend his sympathy and fellowship to 
the one who formerly wronged him. To seek to inflict pain 
upon me after he has succeeded in bringing me to a state 
of mind agreeable to his own would be to seek revenge. It 
would be immoral and cruel. The term which best ex- 
presses this achievement is probably reconciliation. In- 
stead, therefore, of carrying our thoughts to the sphere 
of the court-room with its formal procedure, the Gospel 
of the present-day Christian leads us to.the social circle, 
where men consciously hold fellowship with one another, 
where life is made sweet or bitter, good or bad, ruinous 
or blessed, by the quality of the feelings, thoughts and 
desires which men cultivate toward one another—in a 
word, by right moral relations. 

Much damage has been done to modern religious faith 
by attempts to retain at all cost the forms of an orthodoxy 
that at one time appealed to the sensibilities of religious 
people very powerfully but have long since lost that power, 
because men have reached a stage of spirituality that is 
higher than these forms can express. Were they to succeed, 
the result would be to substitute an intellectual assent to 
a scheme of theological speculation for that inner unity of 
will with God which alone 7s salvation. 


186 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


I do not mean to say that Guilt, Punishment, Justi- 
fication have ceased to have any meaning for religious 
men or that the practices of the courts of justice in no 
wise assist men in arriving at a true knowledge of the 
divine way of dealing with a sinful soul. Far from it. 
But I do mean to say that the use of these terms in the 
established sense of former times is seriously misleading 
to inquiring minds that are exercised over the question 
how to attain to the better life. The continued use of them 
in this connection is permissible only when they are re- 
interpreted in keeping with the higher modern jurisprud- 
ence. The action of a court of justice, especially in self- 
governing countries, is to the most intelligent and serious 
minded people a very solemn procedure. The trial of an 
issue at law, whether it be civil law or criminal law, is a 
most solemn occasion, because the worth of the whole 
system of government under which the people who are con- 
cerned in the trial live is at stake and is tried out in the 
court-room. If right relations between man and man and 
between the individual and the community in which he 
has his habitat are not established through the tribunal 
before which the members of the community have to 
appear on summons, then the foundations of the whole 
community life are undermined and the state is threat- 
ened with collapse. If justice fails at the courts, the 
whole government has failed. The courts of the country 
always reflect the spirit of its constitution. It is quite 
proper, therefore, to represent the way of salvation under 
the forms of court procedure, but only on condition that 
those forms correspond to the nature of the government 
whose character we apprehend and approve. 


ATONEMENT 187 


3. The general conception of government in Protestant 
as well as Catholic countries in Reformation days was in- 
herited from the absolutist systems of the ancient past. 
Protestants of the Reformation times were particularly 
zealous to exalt the absolutist conception of government 
because it furnished a powerful base of attack upon the 
pretentions and the make-shifts of Catholicism. They held 
that God, being the sole author of the law, must also be 
sole judge. While his laws bring blessing to the obedient, 
their violation brings an unalterable judgment upon 
transgressors. That judgment is not directed to the good 
of the subject to be judged (for the transgressor has in the 
premises no claim for favors), but it aims solely at the 
vindication of justice and of the authority of the Ruler. 
When at last the Judgment Day comes, mercy is out of 
the question. The only question is the question of guilt. 
The assessment of the penalty inevitably follows. We 
have seen at an earlier point in our study that the Protest- 
ant orthodox doctrine of atonement and justification re- 
poses on this conception of government. 

Under Protestant influence there has been a wonderful 
development of democracy, especially in the last hundred 
years or so. At first glance this seems strange. With such 
conceptions as we have described underlying Protestant- 
ism the development of a Protestant democracy would 
seem out of the question. And yet it is perfectly natural. 
For the chiefest thing in Protestantism is not its theory 
of atonement and justification but the deep religious con- 
sciousness which the theory was intended to support. 
The greatest thing in Protestantism is its consciousness of 
personal worth in the sight of God. The believer is sure 
‘that he is elect as one of God’s beloved. He has been re- 


188 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


deemed by the Christ. He has the testimony of the divine 
Spirit to his sonship with God. He is conscious of inner 
unity with God. This religious experience of the Protest- 
tants made them invincible. In defence of this ‘‘holy de- 
posit” within them they became the valiant resisters of 
injustice, cruelty and oppression. How natural, how in- 
evitable, it was that in course of time they felt that the 
only acts of legislation that could be regarded as laws of 
God were those which expressed the purest and mightiest 
strivings of their own spirits. It only required a single 
step further for the growing humanitarianism of the 
evangelical spirit to perceive in all men, perhaps in a 
crude and half-suppressed condition, the same deep long- 
ing for the better life which had come to the birth in the 
Christian. The outcome is the discovery of acts of divine 
legislation in the normal aspirations of the human spirit. 
Here lies the true foundation of democracy. God legislates 
for men by legislating in them. 

4. This modern evangelical conception of law has been 
mightily reinforced, if it was not first of all suggested, by 
the scientific conception of natural law. A formulation by 
science of a law of nature is a statement of the mode of the 
operation of those energies which are immanent in the 
natural world. By bringing together the scientific concep- 
tion of natural law and the evangelical conception of the 
spiritual law in man the way is opened for us to recognize 
in the self-legislative action of the human spirit at its 
highest development the revelation of the inmost secret 
of the universe, the disclosure of the purpose for which it 
exists. 

This enables us to understand the deep reverence which 
democratic peoples feel for their own laws. These peoples 


ATONEMENT 189 


agree to observe no laws imposed on them from without 
but only those which set forth their own sovereign legis- 
lative power. These alone can arouse in them the sense of 
compulsion. To prove false to these would be to cast con- 
tempt upon all that is good in themselves and in their 
fellow-citizens. The laws of their country become to them 
the highway to the noblest personal and community des- 
tiny—the laws of God. The enforcement of these laws 
even against themselves, as well as against all other viola- 
tors of them, becomes essential to their self-respect and 
their ultimate good. Herein lies the source of the solidar- 
ity and unconquerableness of democratic peoples. 

5. A court of justice amongst such peoples is sur- 
rounded by a halo of peculiar sancity and reverence. For, 
as has been said already, in the proceedings of the court 
the inner character of their government and its worth are 
disclosed and brought to the acid test. The act of justice 
is just an act of government carried out to the end. The 
aim of the proceedings of the court is identical with the aim 
of the legislation, namely, the good of all who are concerned 
im ut. The enlightened citizen of the country, even if he 
should find himself standing before the court to be tried, 
sees in the dignity of the court a mark of his own personal 
dignity. The laws under which he is judged are, to the 
measure of his powers and influence, the product of his 
own legislative act. If he should be pronounced guilty of a 
violation of those laws, he himself participates in the pro- 
nouncement of the guilt and the execution of the penalty, 
and he knows it. Hence he can, with a dignity and self- 
respect enhanced by the action of the court, submit him- 
self to the consequences. To escape these consequences 
when he merits them would be a loss to him. His good 


190 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


cannot be attained unless the law be enforced. This is the 
motive of the court also. Unless the court seeks and ac- 
complishes the good of the accused as well as the good of 
those whom he has wronged it has not fully achieved the 
end for which it was constituted and to that extent its 
efforts are abortive. In that case justice has failed of 
perfect fulfilment. The court, in order to succeed in its 
business, must bring it about that the guilty man himself 
regard the act of the court as his own act, an act from 
which he as a free legislator could not refrain without a 
sense of terrible loss, even if he were given the opportun- 
ity. If ‘justice’? be not remedial it is less than justice. 

6. If this is the conception of government that is now 
obtaining in democratic countries, it is impossible for a 
Christian citizen of such countries to construe the charac- 
ter and meaning of the divine law in a lower sense. This 
means, of course, that the ideas which have been com- 
monly employed to express the divine justice must be re- 
interpreted, if they are to have a place in the scientific 
thinking of modern Christian men. Do these ideas retain 
their validity? I think they undoubtedly do, and more 
powerfully than ever—it being understood, however, that 
no figures of speech borrowed from the relations of men 
with one another or with the universe can fully express 
the meaning of a man’s relation with God. In any case 
they are metaphorical expressions and at points they 
come short of expressing the full truth. The representa- 
tion of God’s relations with men in terms of jurisprudence 
is always figurative and we come sooner or later to the 
point where the figure fails. But, accepting the validity of 
the juridical terms, guilt, punishment, justification, atone- 
ment, I will now attempt a reinterpretation of these in 


ATONEMENT 191 


accordance with the quality of spiritual life which the 
common intelligent Protestant Christian enjoys today. 


II. THE MEANING OF GUILT 


1. Guilt and the consciousness of guilt are inseparable 
in principle. At first glance this affirmation may seem to 
deprive guilt of its reality and make it merely a subjective 
condition, a merely empirical experience. To the superficial 
view, the question of guilt is simply a question of objec- 
tive fact—was such and such an act committed in contra- 
vention of law? It will be said that many a time some- 
one is guilty of crime who is quite unaware of it, but his 
ignorance of the law furnishes no basis for setting aside 
its claims and by no means nullifies the evil effects of 
the deed. This statement is inexact and involves a care- 
less use of language. 

Owing to the growing influence of the Christian spirit 
on modern jurisprudence, increasing attention is being 
given by courts of justice to the question of the com- 
petency of a person charged with crime to understand the 
significance of his own acts. Juveniles and mental defec- 
tives are not treated with the severity to which criminals 
of normal intelligence must submit. The reason for this is 
plain enough. There is the fear of wronging an imperfect 
human personality by placing it under conditions that 
would prevent its normal development and turn its life 
of hope into a tragedy. In a country where the Christian 
idea of the supreme worth of personality prevails the 
prospect of punishing a man for committing an act that 
he is unable to regard as evil is very repugnant to people 
of high moral sensitiveness and they shrink from being 


192 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


participants in a judicial process that involves it. To 
them it makes a very great difference whether a man is 
aware of the binding character of the law which his action 
outwardly violates or not. The state is under as full an 
obligation to inculcate in its citizens an understanding 
and appreciation of the meaning and purpose of its laws 
and a desire to participate in the making and enforcement 
of them as it is to see that law-breakers meet the con- 
sequences of their disobedience. It is manifestly imposs- 
ible in the end to vindicate any law or give it the true force 
of law except by producing in the minds of all who are 
subject to it, whether they keep it or violate it, a due 
appreciation of its worth. In other words,.a man is truly 
guilty of violating the law only when in its final meaning 
it is the law of his own mind. We are here reminded of the 
self-examination of Paul:—‘‘When I would do good, evil 
is present with me...... With the mind I myself serve 
the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin..... 
I see a different law in my members warring against the 
law of my mind and bringing me into subjection to the 
law of sin which is in my members.”’ The profound sense 
of guilt which he felt was the outcome of his discovery of a 
divided allegiance on his part. The permanent legislative 
power of his own intelligence was constantly challenged 
by a recalcitrant disposition fostered by the upspringing 
of desires that had never been reduced to obedience to the 
supreme inner principle of his true spirit. This immanent 
abiding force in his mind is identical with the law of God. 
Hence the heinousness of the insurrection in his ‘‘mem- 
bers”’. Here lies the final secret of the sense of guilt. It is 
quite in vain for another to charge me with guilt unless a. 
preceding or following utterance springs up from my own 


ATONEMENT 193 


heart: ‘Iam guilty’’. Unless this come to pass, the tribunal 
of justice and its sentence of pain for my misdoing are all 
in vain, so far as I am concerned. This amounts to saying 
that guiltiness is possible only because of a certain quality 
in the thinking of him who is charged with guilt. To 
accuse one of guilt is to ascribe to him this high quality of 
mind that makes his legislative action one with the utter- 
ance of the will of God. It is a mode of acknowledging his 
inner dignity and worth. Of course, the degree of sensi- 
tiveness which people feel toward the law of God and the 
violation of it differs indefinitely in the individuals who 
experience it, but it is experienced in some degree by all. 
Guilt is meaningless where there can be no consciousness 
of guilt. 

2. At this point we raise the question, Can one person 
be the bearer of another’s guilt? We might further inquire, 
What advantage would it be to the other if he could? If 
I truly bear another’s guilt must I not also bear his con- 
sciousness of guilt? To take away another’s guilt and 
still leave him burdened with the consciousness of guilt 
is surely to make him the subject of a grievous delusion. 
To take away the consciousness of guilt and still leave 
him to suffer under guilt is to rob him in part of his true 
manhood. There may be a use for legal fiction in our 
human courts of justice because of the defective character 
of all our arrangements to set men right with themselves 
and with one another, but to resort to such a fiction as to 
affirm that a man is just before God as regards his legal 
standing, when in his heart and conduct he remains 
unjust, is to make God’s grace a ministry of iniquity. 
There can be no transfer of guilt from one person to an- 
‘other, unless it be possible to reduce all righteousness to a 


194 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


mere formality. A doctrine that teaches such a transfer 
sacrifices the spirit of Christianity to the exigencies of a 
legal argument and beclouds the whole question of a 
man’s right relation with God. 

3. But at the same time there is a sense in which one 
can and must bear another’s guilt. It is true in a figurative 
manner, but the figure truly expresses a profound relig- 
ious and moral experience. One can be said to bear 
another’s guilt when he becomes aware, through the 
guilty action of the other, of the unworthy character of a 
likemindedness on his own part with the other. Thus he 
feels the other’s sin as his own and repents for it. The sin 
of a single member of some community becomes a dis- 
closure to the other members of a depravity that is com- 
mon to them all, so that the horror they feel in the 
presence of his deed becomes a sense of guilt and un- 
worthiness on their part. In such a case the members of 
the community cannot allow him to bear the painful con- 
sequences of his misdeeds alone. They must assume re- 
sponsibility for it along with him and become co-sufferers 
with him. Further, one can become so fully aware of 
the worth of another’s personality as to perceive with un- 
utterable anguish the tragedy of another’s failure. Feeling 
the pain and burden of it as deeply as if it were his own 
he vicariously makes it his own and undergoes the same 
agony of effort and endurance to rescue him from it as he 
would in the endeavor to save himself from a similar fate. 
“Bear ye one another’s burdens,” said Paul, ‘‘and so ful- 
fill the law of Christ.’”’ And, speaking out of his experience 
as a member of a community that had missed its day of 
visitation, he exclaims, in the pain of his repenting for 
them, ‘I suffer endless anguish of heart. I could have 


ATONEMENT 195 


wished myself accursed and banished from Christ for the 
sake of my brothers, my natural kinsmen.’’ But he who 
so bears another’s guilt does so, not that they might 
escape from a similar pain of mind but rather that they 
might also bear it in the richest sense open to them and 
thereby find for themselves and others salvation from 
the guilt of the sin. 


III. THE MEANING OF PUNISHMENT 


1. Guilt is commonly conceived as liability to punish- 
ment. That is, when its consequences are in mind. But the 
guilt itself is possibly the punishment. The phrase, ‘‘Pun- 
ishment of sin,” is familiar to all, but its meaning is quite 
obscure. The term Punishment is used sometimes to 
denote simply the infliction of pain willingly, for example, 
when two pugilists are said to punish each other severely. 
But when we are speaking of morals or of government, 
where a presumed offense against law is in question, pun- 
ishment refers to judicial infliction of pain, that is, pain 
imposed by a higher authority on account of a misdeed or 
a violation of law. Everybody is familiar with instances 
of suffering imposed with this intent. Parents punish their 
children, teachers their pupils, and states their citizens 
for the violation of their laws. A league of nations may 
punish other nations for infraction of international law. 
It is unquestionable that from these universal customs we 
learned to think of those sufferings which are beyond the 
power of man to inflict, or which are altogether untrace- 
able to man’s will, as imposed by the will of the Ruler of 
_ the universe. The popular tendency is to regard all ex- 
traordinary, unlooked for, or otherwise unaccountable 


196 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


sufferings as the divine punishment of some sin. After the 
manner of ancient theories of pain, the suffering is looked 
upon as an execution of divine justice. It is doubtful that 
the general acceptance of the scientific law of cause and 
effect will dispel this view, though we may expect it to 
issue in a larger interpretation of the consequences of sin. 

2. This raises the question, whether it is legitimate for 
us to represent the relation of human actions to the forces 
of nature as exhibiting a method of the moral government 
of the world. Is it legitimate for us to transfer to the 
system of the universe the methods of human govern- 
ments in the administration of their systems of law? Can 
the working of the universe be properly. regarded as a 
method of divine jurisprudence? A moment’s thought will 
show that there can be no ex cathedra or categorical an- 
swer to this question. Our actual knowledge of the course 
of the universe and of its ultimate purpose is so infinitesi- 
mal that it would be arrogant presumption to claim that 
the problem is solved. It must be confessed that in this 
vast realm, ‘‘We have but faith, we cannot know.” Yet 
it is true that we do have faith and cannot live without it. 
This faith constantly asserts itself in the effort to know 
and it cannot be satisfied with a negative answer. There 
is no help in nescience. And therefore we must ever look 
out over the world in the hope of finding a confirmation 
and enlargement of our faith. The consciousness of sin, 
the judgment of its unworthy and ill-deserving character, 
is ineradicable in our souls. The demand that there be a 
recognition of this in the government of the world, if there 
be a government of the world at all, is an imperative of 
our nature. The vindication of this contention is the task 
of the apologist of morals and at this point we shall leave 


ATONEMENT 197 


it to him. Ours is the humbler task of expounding the 
sense in which the Christian speaks of the punishment of 
sin as occurring in the course of human life in the world. 

The belief that the course of things in the world will 
surely bring suffering upon the wrong-doer, has always 
been popular. In fact the severe view of the matter has 
always been the most popular even in the Christian 
church with its Gospel of love. The milder views have won 
the allegiance of comparatively few. The doctrine that 
there is an eternal hell for wicked people has had a larger 
and more influential following than the opposite doctrine 
that there is no hell. The Protestants of the Reformation 
had the choice of declaring for the belief in heaven, hell, 
and purgatory. They retained, as we have seen, the belief 
in heaven and hell but they rejected purgatory. And why? 
Not because they delighted in the prospect of endless 
agony for anyone, though in times of controversy male- 
volence is apt to assert itself, and may have done so then. 
But they rejected the doctrine of purgatory because it 
took a compromising view of the desert of punishment. 
It was more self-respecting to take the chance of hell, 
because they felt that the moral issue must be ever clear 
and decisive, because they wanted no terms with sin. And 
the choice they made was their way of expressing their 
loyalty to righteousness and the sense of the turpitude of 
human guilt. Sin deserved punishment and the traditional 
doctrine of hell was the best symbol they could find for 
the truth of the matter. 

3. It may help usto appreciate the popular belief about 
the punishment of sin, if we review briefly the develop- 
ment of it within the Jewish and Christian communions. 
' Primitive peoples, generally, believed that all suffering 


198 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


was inflicted by a mightier being because the sufferer had 
incurred his anger. Death was emphatically considered 
as a divine retribution for sin. Ancient Israel shared this 
common belief and gradually moralized it. Without work- 
ing out a consistent theory, they held that sin and death 
were ultimately inseparable. The penalty, though un- 
avoidable at last, might be deferred by a righteous life 
and by gaining, in consequence, the merited favor of the 
deity. The question took a more serious turn for them 
after the Babylonian captivity, when the sense of per- 
sonal worth and personal responsibility came very forci- 
bly home to them. The belief that all of the people who 
suffered in the national tragedy were not equally sinners 
and that the portion of them who were truly righteous 
would be vindicated found support in the expectation of a 
kingdom of the righteous in the time to come. But such a 
hope required, in consistency, that those righteous ones 
of Israel who had perished without having come to the 
kingdom should be raised from the dead in order to re- 
ceive their reward in that kingdom. Death still remained 
the lot of the wicked. They had lost the kingdom for all 
time to come. At a later time, when a doctrine of a resur- 
rection of both the just and the unjust came to the sup- 
port of the belief in the righteous judgment of God, 
which would make a clear distinction between the right- 
eous and the wicked by punishing the one and rewarding 
the other, the idea of a ‘‘second death’’, the death eternal, 
from which there is no resurrection, came in. Thus was 
evil to be requited and at the same time destroyed. This 
was a very common view among early Christians. Still 
later, when the doctrine of the inherent immortality of 
the human soul became the common belief among Chris- 


ATONEMENT 199 


tians, the belief in an eternal, irrevocable, irremediable 
death was changed to belief in the eternal suffering of the 
wicked. This doctrine of an everlasting punishment be- 
came the orthodox doctrine of both Catholics and Protes- 
tants and one of their most powerful weapons of appeal to 
conscience-stricken people. 

It will appear from this brief review that the growing 
severity of the Christian doctrine of punishment roughly 
parallels the growing intensity of the moral judgment. Can 
it be that this development of the doctrine of punishment 
marks a corresponding loss of that human tenderness and 
pity that is so priceless an asset in our Christianity? 
Hardly so. For this love and this severity are often found 
together in one and the same human heart. The more 
natural explanation of this development is, that a deepen- 
ing sense of the meaning and worth of true goodness has 
carried with it a deepening sense of the greatness of the 
loss that falls upon him who misses it. A sense of the depth 
of badness that lies in the acts that exclude a man from 
participation in this goodness is a natural reaction. 

“But,” it will be said in reply, ‘‘is not the traditional 
belief in an endless hell rapidly losing its hold on the 
minds of Christian people, and that too in an age when 
men are becoming increasingly sensitive to the presence 
and the power of evils that were at one time no source of 
grave anxiety?’ Undoubtedly, this is the case. But it does 
not arise, methinks, from a lowering of the sense of the 
evil of sinning, but from a richer apprehension of the 
meaning of the Christian imperative to remove the sin. 
The old doctrine is losing its hold because of its lack of 
moral worth. It made punishment itself the end of justice 
and counted such an end of greater account than the 


200 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


redemption of the sinner. It represents a degrading view 
of humanity by treating a portion of it as irredeemable 
and thereby abandons the hope of the betterment of 
the race. The imposition of suffering, without the aim of 
making it instrumental to the good of the sufferer, is 
brutalizing to him who inflicts it as well as to him who 
endures it. A hell that expresses no purpose of profiting 
him who enters into it lies outside the sphere of the moral 
life. The man who can be frightened by the prospect of 
such a hell is for that very reason to be pronounced an im- 
moral man and such a physical fear is not worthy of a 
true humanity. Punishment must always be retributive, 
but punishment that is, In purpose, retributive and 
nothing more is rank injustice. j 

4. The punishment inflicted by divine justice is not 
identical with any external consequences attached by 
fiat to the committing of an evil deed but it is carried for- 
ward into the inmost life of the sinner by the very act of 
the will itself. The law of retribution is immanent. The 
evil deed carries with it as its fearful recompense the mak- 
ing of a character of the same nature with itself. This is 
terrible, indeed, to contemplate. An evil deed brings forth 
a progeny of like character with itself, a progeny, ever 
growing in the range and power of its deeds. There is 
probably nowhere in literature a more powerful presenta- 
tion of this terrible truth than the language of the Apostle 
Paul in the first chapter of the epistle to the Romans!?: 
‘“‘As they disdained to acknowledge God any longer, God 
gave them up to a reprobate instinct for the perpetration 
of what is improper, till they are filled with all manner of 
wickedness, depravity, lust and viciousness, filled to the 
brim with envy, murder, quarrels, intrigues, and maligni- 





1Ch., 1:28,29. 


ATONEMENT 201 


ty” (Moffat’s translation). We are not to suppose that 
this is a correct matter-of-fact description of men the 
world over, but it sets forth the truth of the manner in 
which sin brings forth its own punishment in him who 
commits it. Is even this punishment remedial in intent 
‘and in effect? We think so. 


IV. THE MEANING OF JUSTIFICATION. 


In view of what has been said on this subject at various 
points in the earlier pages of this work it is unnecessary to 
add more than a few words in the present connection. 

It is to be remembered that justification is a legal or 
forensic term meaning acquittal by court procedure. It is 
fittingly used to represent in figure the Christian experi- 
ence of salvation. First, because the formal laws of any 
country are attempts on the part of the people to incor- 
porate in definite form the moral principles of their life— 
and the Christian life is an attempt to fulfill the highest 
morality. And, secondly, because the Christian conscious- 
ness of deliverance from impotency in the presence of 
moral evil and its attendant ills to a sense of moral free- 
dom and power is, on its emotional side, like the experi- 
ence of one who stands before a tribunal of justice with 
the fear of condemnation in his soul but leaves it with a 
feeling of freedom and exultation because the court has 
acquitted him. But as soon as the figure of speech is made 
to stand for actual matters of fact, so that God is said to 
reckon a man righteous, when he is not, because he had, 
correspondingly, reckoned Jesus guilty, when he was not, 
then a species of legalism and of dead formalism takes the 
place of a living faith in the good will and graciousness of 


202 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


a holy God to whom one yields himself in humble service 
and with whom he has fellowship in the purpose of his life. 
God is “‘a God that justifies the ungodly’’— that is, 
he is a God who delivers the ungodly from their ungodli- 
ness by making them like himself in character, by making 
them righteous. The death of Jesus Christ on the cross is 
not a device for securing on behalf of men a formal ac- 
quital at the divine tribunal but it is the impartation to 
men of Jesus’ very self in the perfect righteousness of 
his character. He sought to make men righteous positively 
and really and not merely in a legal sense. It is not the aim 
of the Christian Gospel to lead men to dispense with con- 
stant confession of sin and constant repenting unless they 
be at the same time released from constant sinning. Divine 
qustice does not deliver men from the consequences of wrong 
doing in any other way than by delivering them from the do- 
ing of the wrong. That is to say, justification and sancti- 
fication—if for a moment we may use these much abused 
terms—are the same thing considered from different points 
of view. The act of divine justification is the divine act of 
bringing men into the pure, holy, sinless, self-denying, 
vicarious life which the Christian believes to be the life 
of Jesus Christ. He saves men from punishment only by 
saving them from sin. And his act is the act of God. And 
this one century-long activity of his is just God’s own 
graciousness in operation in the world of men. 

When this act of God is called forgiveness, nothing 
different from the foregoing is meant. But when we 
speak of forgiveness attention is drawn more particularly 
to the gracious and tender mind which is God’s own mind 
toward men, the mind that persists in pursuing them in 
kindness, even if it be at times with severity, till they are 


ATONEMENT 203 


reconciled to the holy life of God. In a word—to be made 
God-like in character, to be made Christ-like, that is justi- 
fication, forgiveness, sanctification, reconciliation. This 
and this alone it is the purpose of the Christian Gospel to 
bring to mankind. 


V. THE MEANING OF ATONEMENT 


We shall conclude this chapter with a suggestion of the 
more detailed treatment which this profound and engross- 
ing subject merits. Our interpretation of atonement must 
be a continuation of our exposition of guilt, punishment, 
and justification and be set forth in the same spirit. 

The theme recalls to our mind the depth and the 
persistency, through ages, of the human consciousness of 
an opposition in our deeds or an antagonism in our spirit 
toward the call of the higher life and the deep pain which 
is thereby produced in our hearts. Men have always felt 
that there is something wrong with them. Rude ‘‘primi- 
tive’ people offer gifts to higher beings to avert their 
dreaded anger. Highly refined and sensitive ‘‘modern’”’ 
peoples have their own serious misgivings about them- 
selves and seek by some kind of severe self-culture and 
self-devotion to make amends for personal failures and 
misdeeds. All men, high and low, are ready to rely for 
support and betterment upon some great friend who will 
do for them what they cannot do for themselves and lift 
them to a worthier life. Something of this character is the 
source of the ancient practice of offering sacrifices and the 
prayers of the broken and contrite heart when it offers 
itself to God today. What wonder, then, if those who came 
under the power of the matchless personality of Jesus 


204 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


often spoke of the vicariousness he manifested in his de- 
votion to men to the death, as if he were the great priest 
of humanity who offered himself in sacrifice to God in be- 
half of mankind. But we miss their secret, and his also, if 
we hurl this whole subject into a sea of legalism, make of 
his sufferings a punishment in substitution for ours, in 
order that by means of a legal transfer of guilt to him 
there may be a legal transfer of his righteousness to us. 
The great secret of the Christian faith is, the rather, that 
Jesus’ lifelong work of self-giving for men is to be perpet- 
uated forever in the life of everyone who believes in him. 
This is the one limitless, never-ceasing act of atonement 
for sin. . 
Inasmuch as the tragic death of Jesus disclosed as 
nothing else would have done, so far as we can see, the 
quality of his whole career it has been called the atoning 
deed. The long story of the efforts men have made to 
justify this belief shows that two forms of representation 
have prevailed. According to the one the death of Jesus 
was a priestly act in which the real blood of Jesus was 
effective in putting away the sins of men because it was 
really carried into the presence of God to propitiate him. 
While the epistle to the Hebrews was an attempt to de- 
tach its readers from the Jewish legal priestly system, it 
has been made, in spite of the fact that the author asserts 
that Jesus offered himself “through the eternal spirit”’ and 
that Christians, freed from bondage to the whole priestly 
system, are also to ‘“‘offer sacrifices of praise’ by ‘‘con- 
fession of his name” and by ‘‘good works’’—it has been 
made, I say, to support a system of external sacrifices. 
The Catholic church has mainly clung to this view. The 
Protestant churches have commonly preferred to use the 


ATONEMENT 205 


conceptions of human government as the forms in which 
the Christian atonement can be best set forth, because 
these come much nearer to the profound Protestant con- 
viction that the Christian faith is moral in its fundamen- 
tal character. Here again, unfortunately, the letter has so 
often been substituted for the spirit. Forms of government 
can at best only symbolize the moral transformation in 
which the Christian atonement truly consists. 

In keeping with our exposition of the terms guzvlt, 
punishment, justification we will now say that the Chris- 
tian atonement is a movement in the hearts of men which 
brings them into unity of moral purpose and life with 
Jesus Christ, that is, with God. To understand it we must 
enter into the life experiences of One who bore in his 
spirit the sense of the wrong, the degradation and the woe 
into which men come by sin and yet bore it in the con- 
fidence that the very sin itself opens the door to a higher 
life, that is, if men come to know the power of vicarious- 
ness, whose action is called forth by the fact of sin. The 
self-giving of Jesus Christ is an act that has been, and is 
still, projecting itself through succeeding ages in the very 
same self-giving activity on the part of his followers. It 
becomes one great eternal act of his, fulfilling its meaning 
ever more fully as the race goes forward on its course. I 
see in this one supreme, eternal act the truth that ‘‘God was 
in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing 
their trespasses unto them, and hath placed in us the 
word of reconciliation’’. But that “word of reconciliation”’ 
placed in us is not to be identified with any set form of 
words or doctrines. It is the living word, the presonal life, 
the onward movement of our spirits ever announcing to 
our own consciousness and to all men by our conduct 


206 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


toward them that we have given ourselves to the fulfil- 
ment of the meaning of Christ’s cross as the adoption on 
our part of the divinely revealed, but truly self-enacted 
law of vicarious labor and suffering to bring good out of 
evil. | 
Whenever, therefore, one travels through the valley of 
humiliation on account of another’s misdoings and places 
his powers at the command of the effort to save the sinner 
and those whom he sins against from the moral depravity 
that makes such sinning a possibility, he is making atone- 
ment for sin. Christ is making it through him. He can say 
with Paul, “I am suffering now on your behalf, but I re- 
joice in that I would make up the full sum of all that 
Christ has to suffer in my person on behalf of the church, 
his body.” If Paul is right, as I think he is, then all who 
profess the salvation of Christ are to look forward to offer- 
ing themselves all the way through life as an atonement 
for men’s sins. I know of no other atonement than this. 
1Col. 1: 24 





CHAPTER X 
THE SAVED COMMUNITY 


We often meet the question, Is the Christian conscious- 
ness of a deliverance (as it is called) from the lower life to 
the higher capable of becoming a universal human experi- 
ence? May it be carried so far forward into the life of man- 
kind that at last the entire race will come permanently 
under its sway? May it be made the bond of a united 
humanity and therewith a deliverance from all man-made 
evils? 

Let us put the question a little more concretely :— 
Among all peoples there have emerged certain group 
forms of the community life—family, school, civil state, 
court of justice, industrial and commercial order—which 
tend to become permanent. These are not products purely 
of some individual’s inventive genius but have grown up 
so gradually and almost imperceptibly as to seem native 
to the race. While each of such institutions occupies an 
area peculiarly its own, they have a complementary and 
mutually influential relation to one another. Persons may 
be active in several of them at the same time. Our ques- 
tion is:—Does the religious faith called Christian tend to 
preserve and enhance or to dissolve these? 

Theories on the subject have generally held that the 
Christian faith produces an institution of its own, an 
institution that is peculiarly sacred, as over against these 
secular orders, and that this heavenly institution is bound 
to endure while the others are of inferior worth and must 


207 


208 CHRISTIAN SALVATION | 


pass away. This theory rests on the supposition that the 
Christian faith arises not out of natural conditions and 
qualities native to the human spirit but issues from 
action proceeding from a different, an alien, realm. 

If this be the true view, then the Christian faith is 
essentially unworldly, its highest virtues are those that 
signify the complete renunciation of the world and its aim 
is to divert the minds of men from the natural order of life 
and of the world and fix their attention entirely on the sac- 
red order opposed to the secular. The upshot of such a view 
would be the limitation of the practice of the true faith to a 
few chosen spirits among men to whom this peculiar power 
has been given. All others, who are incapable of mak- 
ing the great renunciation, are doomed ‘to a partially 
Christian, semi-secular life in the earth with the hope, 
perchance, of entering at last upon the holy, truly Chris- 
tian experience, but only after death. In keeping with this, 
the natural course of the world must be expected to tend 
toward a final anarchy which could be swept away only 
by a universal cataclysm of nature. 

But there is another view, the view, namely, that the 
faith of the Christian is just such a faith as might be 
expected to arise in the breasts of such men as we are by 
our nature and in such a world as ours. According to this 
view, the Christian faith would be in harmony with and 
truly express those native qualities of ours that enable 
us to live together in peace and to exercise our natural 
powers to the fullest extent. This faith would be seen to 
bring its possessor into ever more intimate contact with 
the world of men, into ever richer sympathy with their 
common hopes and longings, their sense of achievement 
and defeat, and to impart to all the secular pursuits of men 


THE SAVED COMMUNITY 209 


a sacred character. Moreover, it would tend to transform 
the hard, unfeeling and conscienceless material world into 
a holy temple like unto that temple of the human spirit 
out of which the faith itself emerged. The saved commun- 
ity would be here and, therefore, hereafter. Does the 
Christian faith in this manner tend to unify mankind in a 
saved community? 

At the outset it must be frankly admitted that, if we 
make our appeal to the historian, his reply sounds far 
from unequivocal. The Christian faith sprang up at its 
beginning out of the bosom of the Jewish church-nation, 
but it soon became a pronounced heresy and broke away 
to form a separatist group. Ere long it was found spread- 
ing rapidly among other peoples, but Christians were so 
exclusive and so intolerant toward other religions that 
they were often known as “the atheists.”” A common 
watchword among them seems to have been, “‘Come ye 
out from among them and be ye separate.’”’ In many 
Christians, instead of a deep appreciation of the dominant 
ethnic institutions and orders of life around them, there 
appeared an ardent hope and expectation of a “day of 
wrath” when all those institutions of the “ungodly” 
would pass away in the great “‘fire’’. Moreover, the Chris- 
tians soon became much divided among themselves. Not 
even the formation of the Catholic Church, organized 
upon the basis of a creed required of all its members, and 
supported by the imperial Roman government, could 
avail to bind all Christians together in a single institution 
or to prevent the rise successively of powerful bodies of 
dissidents. Thus has it continued down to the present 
time. We have hundreds, if not thousands, of organiza- 
tions bearing the Christian name, but each having its own 


210 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


system of belief and of activity differing from all the 
others. In the field of politics there seem to be phenomena 
of like import as regards the influence of the Christian 
faith. For many a political revolt seems traceable to the 
uprising of the Christian spirit against the established 
order. 

Over against all this there stands the fact that the ad- 
herents of the Christian faith have constantly held before 
themselves, as an ideal in prospect, the union of all Chris- 
tians at last in one great community of spirit, a commun- 
ity reaching even beyond the boundry line between the 
living and the dead and continuing forever. But it re- 
mains a question whether there be resident in the Chris- 
tain faith the power to achieve this end. The doubt is 
particularly suggested by the great pall of darkness that 
hangs over the ideal just mentioned. I refer to the belief 
sponsored by the great outstanding Christian creeds and 
confessions in their doctrine of a final dual destiny of the 
human race. Why should such a prospect, so fatal to the 
high hope of a unified humanity, have held its place so 
firmly in the minds of Christians for so long a time—why, 
if it be not because we all know that the initiative of the 
individual is irrepressible and he can never remain con- 
tent with any fixed order of life. In order to maintain 
possession of his own soul he must break through the 
restraints imposed upon him by any community that has 
been or is to be. The rebel among men is sure to appear 
and, if he be in the wrong, are not the consequences to him- 
self irreversible? 

Or shall we say that it is in the continual oscillation 
between the daring of the individual and the conservatism 
of the institutionalized community that the process of 


THE SAVED COMMUNITY 211 


human betterment makes its way onward? Shall we say 
that the community of the saved is, in one aspect of its 
life, the community to be saved by the dissenting individ- 
ual. For him, at any rate, it often comes about that the 
so-called saved community is that from which he seeks to 
be saved. Our question then is: In what relation does the 
Christian faith stand toward these contending forces? 


I, THE PRINCIPLES THAT GOVERN THE RELATIONS BE- 
TWEEN THE COMMUNITY AND THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE 
COURSE OF HUMAN PROGRESS EVERYWHERE. 


1. It will facilitate the discovery of an answer to our 
question if for a moment we review the attitude we must 
assume toward the sins of the individual, on the one hand, 
and his virtues, on the other. 

The sins of an individual are always judged by the 
observer on the basis of his relation to some community 
to which he seems to pertain, but an observer who is him- 
self within this same community will judge his act differ- 
ently from one who is without it. In the former instance 
the individual’s act which the observer calls a sin is 
viewed as a violation of the constituent character of the 
community to which both the sinner in question and the 
oberver belong. In the instance of the outsider it is viewed 
as expressing the quality of the life of that very commun- 
ity. In the former instance again, the aim is to protect the 
community against the violence of the individual, to 
justify the character of the community by condemning 
the act of the man and, in the end, to save the community 
at the man’s cost. But in the latter of the two instances 
there is an effort to erect a bulwark against the assaults 


212 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


of the community to which the man pertains and to justi- 
fy the claim of the observer that the community of which 
he himself is a member possesses a life of a higher type 
than the other. In this form of the issue the question is, 
as to the relative worth of two contrasted communities. 
We shall find that a true judgment of the matter must 
embrace both of these views. 

When the individual sinner is viewed as the sole sinner 
in the case, his act is considered within a narrow range. 
He is treated as being under supreme obligation to the 
community against which he seemed to have sinned. His 
place within the community he owes to the action of the 
community itself. From the community emanates the law 
of his life and when he violates that community’s will 
its authority over him comes into action in a fitting 
manner. It seeks to save itself either by reducing him to 
subjection to its will or by excluding him from any further 
share in its life. The offense he has committed may be 
charged to his own independent self-will and be counted, 
therefore, an act of rebellion. In that case his independence 
must be overthrown, lest he infect other members of the 
community and it be thereby destroyed. Or, by excluding 
him from its membership, the community leaves him free 
to pass over into some other community from whose life 
his act really proceeded, if such a community can be 
found. Ancient and modern jurisprudence alike abound 
in illustrations of this view. Achan and his family are 
destroyed in order to save Israel from wrath. By the 
counsel of the Jewish Caiaphas Jesus is executed, ‘“‘that 
the whole nation perish not’’. King Charles I of England 
is beheaded as a traitor to the nation in the interest of 
national deliverance. The Roman Church pronounced 


THE SAVED COMMUNITY 213 


heresy a capital crime because it violated the unity of the 
Church and endangered its existence. Josiah Royce, our 
pre-eminent American philosopher, seems to find no other 
ground of the need of atonement than the treason of the 
individual toward the community. According to these 
practices, it is the community that is originally holy and 
worthful, and it alone has the inherent right to live. The 
individual’s rights are derivative because it is only within 
the community he has any rights whatsoever. He who, 
like Cain, belongs to no community has no rights and his 
life may be taken away with impunity. According to the 
point of view, then, of the inside observer, unless we 
quite misread the story of the community life of human- 
ity, it is the recalcitrancy or the self-assertion of the in- 
dividual, with this consequent set toward innovation, that 
repeatedly threatens to frustrate all attempts to make 
any established order of life whatsoever permanent. 
When we take the standpoint of the observer who is 
outside that community in which the sinner in question 
has held a membership, we meet a different aspect of the 
matter. If he disapproves the deed, there is a tendency on 
his part to see in it just such a deed as might be expected 
of the member of such a community. The array of forces 
resident in that community comes to light in that partic- 
ular deed. The community then comes under the same 
sentence as the individual who is a member of it. But if 
the outside observer approves the deed, he tends thereby 
to regard the man as belonging in reality to the same 
community as himself and as holding nominal allegiance 
to the other. In any case there is a community reference, 
but the question always arises: Is the community from 
which the individual seems to have sprung the commun- 


214 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


ity to which he now really belongs? Does he really belong 
to any community at all? Or does he belong solely to 
himself? 

If at last we turn to ask of the sinner himself an in- 
terpretation of his action, we get further light. If he joins 
in the condemnation other members of the community 
have pronounced on his deed, he declares thereby that he 
has now come into a real participation in the life of the 
community that was offended by his action. But if he 
continues to approve it he thereby declares himself out- 
side the community. In either case he will experience a 
feeling of pain—in the former case pain at the thought 
that he has violated the principle of the community’s 
existence and at the same time the worth of his own 
personality, and, in the latter case, pain at the thought 
that the community to which he has been hitherto at- 
tached has proved false to the higher principle of life that 
he had symbolized in his deed. This begets in him the will 
to find or to create a community of whose character his 
deed may be regarded as a true expression. In any event, 
whenever we appeal to the judgment of the supposed 
sinner, there is found a reference to a community to 
which he now belongs or will belong. But this is by no 
means the whole truth of the matter. 

In the mind of the individual concerned there is always 
a self-reference. It comes to light when we raise the ques- 
tion as to the source of his deed. To that question there is 
one answer that finally puts all other answers out of court 
—“T did it’”’. Even though he may point to other individ- 
uals or a community of them from which the impulse, or 
the suggestion, or the habit that eventuated in this par- 
ticular act proceeded, nevertheless the final verdict of the 


THE SAVED COMMUNITY 215 


self-judged is always, “I did it’’. This, I think, is the most 
significant fact in the story of human life. The supreme 
court that exercises jurisdiction over the individual holds 
its sessions within his own soul. This means, of course, 
that at that same instant he is sitting in judgment on the 
community whose character is reflected in his deed, be it 
good or bad. But at that point he seems to have projected 
his personality beyond the range of individuality. Here 
we perceive the high prerogative claimed by the individ- 
ual and there seems no way open for us to refute his claim. 

2. With the aid of the foregoing, rather apocopated, 
discussion we may now attempt to state briefly the princi- 
ples that govern the whole course of human betterment, 
whether in the individual or in the group. 

We begin with that which to each of us is the most 
truly known because it is the most immediately known, 
namely, the self-awareness of the man. He knows himself 
as he knows no other, the knowing subject and the known 
object being one and the same. He directs himself as he 
directs no other—self-direction it is that makes man 
MAN. His experiences are his as they are no other’s. 
Hence his deeds are his as they are no other’s. In very 
truth every new deed of his is a new fact in the world. 
That particular deed—I refer not merely to its outer de- 
tail but to its inward character as well—was never com- 
mitted by him or anyone else before. Even when he joins 
with others in an act that is counted an act in common to 
all concerned in it, his own part in it takes on, to our 
view, a peculiar quality the moment we survey it in its 
ultimate character as a spiritual process. It is not identi- 
cal with the part played by any other. Even if we may say 
that he gathers up in himself an inheritance acquired by 


216 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


the activities of his ancestral family, tribe and nation, 
still the character of that inheritance is altered by his 
every deed. The man’s very soul is his own as it is no 
other’s. Were it not so, the history of humanity would 
present simply a monotonous repetition of common- 
places and life would lose its interest and its upward 
spring. The very possibility of spiritual progress—and, 
for that matter, of deterioration as well—lies in the spon- 
taneity and initiative of the individual. 

In the next place, we must point out that the very 
personal consciousness of the individual proves itself in 
the life of the race to be more than an exclusive personal 
possession. The individual is more than an individual. 
The impulse to communicate one’s secret to the world is 
universal and irresistible. If his possession remains pecu- 
liar to himself, if it be incommunicable, if it cannot be 
circulated among men so as to become the common 
property of all, it is really worthless to its supposed owner. 
He who can reserve to himself the quality he prizes the 
most, he who is unable to communicate his best has, 
so far as we can tell, nothing of value to give. The 
whole story of human life becomes the story of the 
manner in which the human creative personality has 
wrought toward the transformation of the race by seek- 
ing to impart to every member of it his own very self- 
hood in all its worth. Every new-born child finds 
itself in the bosom of a community each member of which 
is seeking to convey to him the wealth of the intellectual, 
aesthetic and moral heritage into which he himself has 
been born, plus the increment which each one of these 
members has brought to its life in his own personality. 
Thus also the religious life of men is marked by the 


THE SAVED COMMUNITY 217 


presence in it of types which have appeared where geo- 
graphical, racial, intellectual and other contacts: and 
intimacies have made it possible for temporarily separable 
communities to arise. Each member of the group finds 
himself borne up by the accumulated experiences of pre- 
ceding generations. These are embodied in the modes of 
thought, speech, and action which are closely woven into 
the organism of the society in which he moves from his 
earliest days. Without explicit recognition on his part of 
the play of these forces on his susceptibilities, he has been 
put into possession of aptitudes altogether beyond the 
capacity of the man who has no such environment. It is 
thus that types of religion arise. 

When the religious reformer stands up to denounce 
customs or doctrines in vogue among his people, the very 
protest he makes against the continuance of the objec- 
tionable features of their life takes on a character which 
the community itself has been active in making. His pro- 
test is such a protest as only a member of that community 
could offer. John the Baptist’s warning of a coming judg- 
ment on the Jews had a basis in the spiritual life of the 
Jewish community of which the preacher himself had 
been a member. Luther’s attack upon the sale of indulg- 
ences would not have occurred but for the permeation of 
his mind with high spiritual intuitions which had an es- 
tablished place in the bosom of the same Catholic com- 
munity whose sin he was denouncing. Rogers Williams’ 
successful protestation against the imposition of legal 
disabilities upon people’ holding certain religious beliefs 
would not have arisen, so far as we can tell, but for his 
presence in a community that had suffered for conscience’ 
sake. And thus it is always. But this is not to say that the 


218 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


reformer is wholly a product of the community whose life 
he has shared. Far from it. Our statement means that the 
individual who makes an advance beyond the traditions 
of the community of which he has been a member hitherto 
makes such an advance as the life of that community and 
no other has made possible for him. But no man is wholly 
a member of any concrete community that 1s now or ever has 
been. There is for him a more vital and more intimate 
relation than can be found in the concrete human com- 
munity. 

3. It is to be noted that this inward and necessary 
relation of the individual to the community carries with 
it no implication of a disparagement of his worth but 
rather an enhancement. The isolated man Is a savage and 
he who seeks to isolate himself from his fellow men tends 
toward savagery. The savage is a menace to the civilized 
community and must be tamed by the communication of 
its qualities to him. The devotee to the monastic life pure 
and simple is a promising candidate for savagery. Op- 
positely, the practical acceptance of the view offered in 
these pages exalts the individual. On the one hand, it 
throws his soul open to those mighty spiritual currents 
that course through the lives of multitudes of other men 
and that enrich his soul by making it heir to their wealth. 
And, on the other hand, it opens to him an avenue to the 
exercise of a boundless influence, in that it enables him to 
penetrate the souls of others with the peculiar power of 
his own personality. His life is no longer shut up within 
the narrow confines of an individual selfhood but goes on 
in the lives of countless multitudes. 

The great man is not he who stands aloof from others, 
pronounces his judgment on them and claims for himself 


THE SAVED COMMUNITY 219 


a character possessed by no other. But the great man is he 
who is able to comprehend and unify in his own soul the 
love and longing, the ambitions and hopes, the fears and 
strivings of a community of people whose man he is be- 
cause they find their true soul revealed in him. Nations 
honor their great men because they see in the grandeur of 
such persons their own true worth prophetically set forth. 
They visualize in these the fulfillment in themselves of 
potentialities undiscovered until their great man ap- 
peared. In the end, therefore, it is the great man that 
makes the nation great. For he prefigures to them all the 
quality of that good toward which their life must move if 
it is not to be lost. 

The same is true of religions. The great religion, the 
religion with a glorious future is not the faith that makes 
men recluses and exalts them to mountain peaks of ex- 
perience that the multitudes cannot share. But the great 
religion is the religion in which there is disclosed a person- 
ality in whom the whole world of humanity can find its 
destiny, a personality that seeks to embrace all other per- 
sonalitites in his aims and activities, so that in him man- 
kind discovers the principle of its own unity and peace. 
The great religion is the religion of the Great Community 
that finds its life in the Great Individual. 

But who is the great individual? Not he whose spiritual 
worth, whose inner wealth, whose personality can be 
described as merely the product of the spiritual processes 
which were at work in the lives of the generations of men 
who went before him. Nor can the great individual be re- 
garded as merely the unification of all these processes in a 
single self-contained career. For in accepting either of 
these definitions we should be guilty of overlooking the 


220 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


true character of that activity by virtue of which this in- 
clusion and unification of processes that are now in the 
past was effected. The great individual is he who is most 
truly creative, he who unites in himself vast inheritances 
from the past only as supplying a footing, a point of de- 
parture, for an enterprise which springs out of his own 
initiative, an enterprise that was never another’s in the 
sense or manner in which it is his, an enterprise which, as 
it is progressively achieved, reveals to other persons the 
worth of potencies hitherto dormant in their own natures 
but capable of realization in them all. The great individ- 
ual is more than the heir of the great community from 
whose bosom he issued. He is the creator of the new com- 
munity. If, then, the community in general represents the 
principle of continuity in human life, if it is the conserva- 
tor of past achievement, the individual represents the 
principle of progress. He is the Maker of the New. 

It is but another way of saying the same thing if we 
declare that the individual who is only heir to the past is 
lost. He needs to be saved from that very community 
whose life is continued in his own. To be nothing more 
than it has made him is to be only a product—a sort of 
thing. He must discover a mission and deliver a message 
which has never been another’s. And in giving himself to 
this selfdiscovered mission, in uttering the message which 
is a new and living word, he commits himself to the task 
of making this most cherished wealth of his the property 
of the world of men. 

The experience of salvation and the activity of saviour- 
hood are inseparable. Only in giving one’s self to the 
world is one saved from the world. It is only in the com- 
mitment of one’s self to the world, only in the giving of 


THE SAVED COMMUNITY eek 


one’s self to all men, only in the projection of one’s self 
into the life of mankind, that one finds deliverance from 
the evil that is in the world. For in order to escape from 
evil, it is necessary that a man carry out into the world 
the new good of which he has become possessed in such 
a way that it becomes the bond of a new community and 
finds enhancement there. 


II. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AS THEY 
BEAR UPON THE QUESTION OF A COMMUNITY 
SALVATION 


1. Our first affirmative touching this point is:—The 
Christian faith 1s identical with the spirit of loyalty to a 
historic figure of the past who is at the same time the ideal 
figure of the future. This figure bears the name of Jesus 
Christ. 

If the literature that registers the thoughts of professed 
Christians throughout their age-long productivity is a 
safe index to the Christian mind wherever found, then it 
is certain that the first outstanding fact of its history is 
the uniqueness of Jesus Christ among men. According to 
the Christian estimate, in the list of human names he has 
no equal and no rival. The utterances of personal piety, 
the liturgies of public worship, the speculations of Chris- 
tian thinkers, the formal creeds and confessions speak all 
with one voice here. To tell exactly how this came about, 
to enumerate and characterize the influences at work in it, 
may be quite beyond the power of the historian, but there 
stands out clearly the fact of his indisputable supremacy 
for all who bear his name. The supreme worth of the per- 
sonality of Jesus Christ in relation to the solution of the 
problem of human life, in the definition of its highest aim, 


222 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


and in the impartation of the energy necessary to achieve 
it is a dogma of the Christian spirit. No matter what new 
outlooks on life, what new virtues and graces, what new 
hopes of betterment may have come to Christians with 
the progress of the centuries, they have attributed all 
these to him and found in him the highest incentive to 
their fulfilment. This unique transformation of a human 
career, lived under definite limitations in the past, into an 
ideal of life regarded as valid for all time to come and 
within any environment whatsoever, is the most remark- 
able fact, I say, in Christian history and, perhaps, in all 
history. We are here simply pointing to the fact, we are 
not trying to justify it. 

Every student of Christian history has observed how, 
as the decades and centuries of Christian experience sub- 
jected this confidence in him to a critical testing, new 
predicates of his worth were heaped on one another until 
the ‘‘good teacher’’ and ‘‘friend of sinners’”’ became known 
as “‘very God of very God”’. Nor can it be denied that this 
was, at least in part, an outcome of the growing realiza- 
tion of the meaning of his historic career. In fact his name 
has become synonymous with the principle of betterment 
that is operating everywhere in the life of humanity and 
at the same time, as men have hoped, in the universe of 
which they are denizens. And this is to say that the Chris- 
tian faith is the human self-committment to a supreme 
personality in whom humanity and its universe find their 
meaning and their consummation and that the character 
of that personality is disclosed progressively in the evol- 
ving career of Jesus Christ throughout the Christian cen- 
turies. And, again, this is to say that the hope of mankind 


4 


THE SAVED COMMUNITY 223 


lies in a universal participation in the quality of his per- 
sonality. 

2. When Jesus created in the breast of his first diciple 
a faith in his personal worth he projected into the life of 
humanity an impulse that seems bound to issue in the 
formation of a community as broad as the life of the race. 

There is no clear evidence that Jesus had in mind the 
formation of a regular institution for the propagation of 
his teachings or that he sought to provide for the creation 
of such an institution by his followers. But, after the 
manner of strong personalities of all times, he drew about 
him a group of people whose bond of union lay in their 
common attachment to himself. What in particular it was 
that drew them to him they were probably as little able 
as other men who attached themselves to a hero to ex- 
plain. Our New Testament is in part a record of their at- 
tempt to do so. But the writers of these little works would 
probably have been prompt to admit that their attempt 
was only a partial success. But, at any rate, we can gather 
this, that they believed they found in him the desired 
interpretation of the way to the better life. Whatever the 
symbols they may have used to express this, he is always 
at the heart of them. If that better life was to come by 
means of a great cataclysm and a final destruction of evil, 
he it was, they said, that should appear to pronounce the 
judgment and assure its execution. If that better life was 
to be propagated by the blood of its martyrs, then he was 
the great Martyr by whose blood they were all able to 
pay the price of loyalty. If in the end all his people were 
to be sinless, that was to come through seeing him as he 
really is. If an inward divine spirit was to fashion their 


224 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


minds alike and bind them into an inner unity, this spirit 
was to be just Jesus himself living and working in them. 
Thus, through their common relation to him, there grew 
up the mutual appreciation that was shown in their love 
of meeting together and that bound them in a firm union 
of heart and effort. Here was begotten the confidence that 
wherever this personal attitude toward him could be es- 
tablished in human hearts there would be found the longed 
for community of goodness and peace, the Kingdom of 
God. This is wholly in keeping, in fact, identical with 
the great law of the community everywhere. As the di- 
vergent tastes and wishes of the children in the family 
home are subdued and harmonized by a beloved parent’s 
affection for them all, as the conflicting views of the stud- 
ents of a great master are remolded and severally made 
factors in the making of a larger philosophy of life for 
them all through the alluring genius of a constructive 
mind, and as the strifes between the soldiers of an army 
are allayed and calmed in the presence of a great com- 
mander; just so the hope of a united humanity lies in the 
advent and constant presence init ofa personality in whom 
each and all can find an ideal object to which all other 
aims are to be made subject and tributary. Always and 
everywhere among men it is the great individual that 
founds the great community. The point is—the great in- 
dividual is always the center of a community’s life, a com- 
munity that reflects the quality of his greatness. This is 
the law of the community and the story of the progress of 
the Christian faith illustrates it abundantly. 

But it is not proved hereby that this faith really cher- 
ishes in the hearts of men as supreme the principle which 
is to prove itself competent to create the perfect and all- 


THE SAVED COMMUNITY 225 


inclusive community. Of this, of course, it is absurd to ask 
for absolute proof, since the real proof of the worth of a 
principle of action is gradually evolved in the living prac- 
tice of it. The corollary of the confidence that one has dis- 
covered the highest principle of our self-conscious life is a 
devotion of one’s energies to the effort to gain for it a 
world-wide acceptance. That alone can be shown to be 
absolutely valid which is universally in control. 

Our question now becomes, What seems to be the out- 
standing characteristic of this ideal personality we call 
Jesus Christ that gives us the right, as we believe, to look 
for the growing realization of the hope to found a uni- 
versal human community through the attraction of his 
personality? There have been answers given to this ques- 
tion in the past. For example, it has been said that God 
has foreordained the absolute lordship of Jesus over the 
race. He is to be the final Judge of mankind. Or it has 
been said that he must be supreme because he is the only 
God Incarnate. But both of these carry us to an unknown 
realm outside the horizon of our conscious life. They leave 
us strangers to his inner self, which is the matter of high- 
est moment to us now. Instead of turning in either of 
these directions, we must turn the rather to the concrete 
personality as he is portrayed in the earliest portraits we 
have of him and the gradual completion of the figure with 
the growing life of the Christian people. This, of course, 
involves a vast field of study. We must here content our- 
selves with a suggestion or two. 

3. This idealization of Jesus by Christians is a reflex of 
his own idealization of the human personality for its own 
sake. 


226 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


There is a tendency universally among men to idealize 
the new-born child. This power of idealization is the secret 
source of the new-found joy of its parents and of all the 
loving care and semi-divine worship that is paid to it. It 
is only the hard knocks coming from the common failures 
that the child makes in its life that leads us to reduce our 
hopes to the level of the commonplace. But he who can 
maintain the high idealization of the child after it has be- 
come a man and after the man has cruelly disappointed 
the anticipations that gave a divine sacredness to his life; 
he who gives himself unwaveringly and unstintedly to 
that fallen man because the image of a perfected career he 
once perceived in the child is still to be discerned in the 
man—the man, I say, who can do this is the true hero 
who is able to gather to himself the loyalities of men 
everywhere. Moreover, he who can still perceive in a 
beaten and baffled man, in a man whose form is scarred by 
his own misdeeds, an ideal aim still struggling for self-ex- 
pression and fulfillment, sees in the very sins and errors 
of that man a powerful reminder of an ideal that must not 
be allowed to perish. And, therefore, this hero of ours 
sees in that man an object to which he may give himself 
in the full plentitude of -his powers, a personality with 
whom he may establish a deeper fellowship because of the 
very fact that he seems to have failed to find himself. 
Right here we see the main lineaments of the portrait of 
Jesus in the Gospels. 

We meet constantly with his refusal to see in men only 
that which they seem to others to be. It is reflected in his 
rebukes and denunciations as well as in his words of prom- . 
ise and comfort, in his exposure of hypocrites as well as in 
his welcome to the religious outcast. We see it all the way 


THE SAVED COMMUNITY 227 


through his career to the point where he lays himself 
down on his cross. And this is the thing, mind you, which 
has been distinctive of his character as that has been 
interpreted by successive generations of Christians. They 
have conceived the presence of just such a personality in 
a growing life of multitudes of men, a personality of whom 
each one who feels the power of the portrait says, ‘‘He 
loved me and gave himself for me.’’ In consequence there 
has sprung up with ever-growing energy in the Christian 
mind the conception of a world of men to each one of 
whom it is his right to give himself in the full communion 
of his own personality. This attempt to come into an- 
other’s life with the secret power of one’s own carries with 
it at the same time an accession of confidence in one’s own 
personal worth. 

This very communicability of one’s self to another 
would be meaningless did it not at the same time make 
the possessor of it receptive to the action of the other. For 
apart from this receptivity toward the other the apprecia- 
tion of the other’s worth, of which we have spoken, would 
fall away. There rises, therefore, for the Christian be- 
liever the vision of a world where every man, in all the 
plentitude of his power, is a member of a community that 
has the riches of the universe at its disposal, a community 
also in which all the members are both benefactors and 
beneficiaries of all. This would be a community in 
which all persons have become sacred and the world of 
which they are denizens has become a sanctuary, all its 
forces being contributory to one supreme end. Where is 
that world to be found and where shall we find that happy 
community? 


228 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


The traditional answer to the question is familiar to us 
all—In heaven, in the world to which we go after death. 
But when the question is pressed further, Who are to be 
the denizens of that world? The traditional answer is, 
Not all, but only the good. And when we ask still further, 
Are these good all perfectly good? the answer is, Yes, all are 
perfect and there is no better world or better state to be 
found. If we ask yet one more question, Is there no better- 
ment possible for those who are excluded from that world? 
and meet a reply in the negative, then we feel that that 
perfect community and the perfect world in which it is to 
live are less than Christian, since that idealization of per- 
sonality which is the very soul of the Christian faith is 
confessedly abandoned by the members of that supposed- 
ly perfect community. We do not for that reason abandon 
our ideal but turn rather to the effect of the ideal that 
comes to light in the Christian estimate of personality, 
progressively wrought out among the dust and swirl of 
our common life here on the earth. 


III. THE ISSUE—-IN WHAT MANNER DOES THE CHRISTIAN 
FAITH CONTRIBUTE TO THE CREATION OF THE LONGED- 
FOR RACE COMMUNITY OF THE HIGHER ORDER? 


The answer to be offered here can be given only in out- 
line and by way of mere suggestion. We shall put it at 
first in a somewhat dogmatical form. By virtue of its esti- 
mate of personality the Christian faith is a radically recon- 
structive force in those relations of man to man we call 
social. For that very reason it 1s constitutive of the better com- 
munity and works toward the permanency of the human 
community life. 


THE SAVED COMMUNITY 229 


In our present discussion we have not been led to the 
discovery of a principle of the community life that can be 
called exclusively Christian, that is, a principle that oper- 
ates only within the historic Christian community; but, 
on the contrary, we have been led to see in the Christian 
faith a principle in command that is the true basis of 
human communities wherever found, even if in many ways 
those communities present a contradiction of it. The dis- 
tinctive thing about the Christian faith is that this 
principle becomes dominant because there it gets explicit 
recognition. 

For this reason we shall not look for some distinct and 
peculiar institution as, in contrast to all others, the di- 
vinely ordered embodiment of this principle and there- 
fore to continue as a divine institution for all time. 
Churches, or denominations of Christians, have sought to 
establish this very claim for themselves but they have all 
been subjected, one by one, to the processes of dissolution 
that come by way of division in their interpretation and 
practice of life. And this is not to be really regretted, 
though it may seem like the dissolution of the Christian 
ideal. For it tends to prevent that stagnation of the power 
of intelligence and will that comes out of the depersonaliz- 
ing influence of all fixed forms either of thought or of ac- 
tion. That is to say, the growth of dissent in any field of 
human interest whatsoever may be properly regarded as 
tending to bring to clearer recognition the principle that 
is most truly basic to the human community wherever 
found, and therefore tends to the preservation and en- 
hancement of the community itself. We may even go 
further and say that it is by no means certain that any 
organization or institution that is regarded as distinctive- 


230 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


ly religious, in contrast to the so-called secularinstitution, 
is to be looked upon as permanently necessary. May it 
not be that that higher purpose of self-giving to all others, 
the vicariousness seen in Jesus Christ associated, as it 
always must be, with a receptivity toward all others, will 
become so dominant a factor in the so-called secular in- 
stitutions that they will be the true churches, the con- 
gregations of the faith, the saved communities that in 
their inner and outer progress are ever building humanity 
into one all-inclusive community. 

We may take a brief and hurried glance at the manner 
in which the Christian faith builds up certain forms of 
association that have endeared themselves to men by 
their ministry everywhere. 

We begin with the natural family. Roman Catholicism 
regards complete membership in the family life as detri- 
mental to the highest good and as representing a plane of 
life lower than the celibate, which is the truly spiritual, 
because the physical relations involved in the making of a 
family are detrimental to the aim of absolute devotion to 
the spiritual and divine. But if the sense of the supremacy 
of personal worth, characteristically Christian, permeates 
and controls the action even of physical affection, then 
the physical instincts cease to be merely physical and 
come under subordination to the ultimate aim of produc- 
ing true, noble, eternal personality. The natural affection 
of the man and the woman for each other becomes the 
love which is identical with mutual self-commitment to 
the highest end. Thus the Christian spirit erects the chief 
bulwark of the home and the happiness that springs up 
in the home life. The children by their coming reveal to 
their parents a worthier destiny than could be attained 


THE SAVED COMMUNITY 231 


without them. In the pursuit of that common end their 
native inequalities or antipathies are outgrown and each 
parent becomes in body and spirit the source of ever new 
virtues that make their permanent residence in the home. 

In the same way the faith exalts the children. For the 
parents, beholding in each of them a future personality 
filled with the beauty and the power of Jesus Christ and 
fulfilling in the world a destiny than which there can be no 
higher, cannot treat those children of destiny as mere 
subjects of a despotic will or as irresponsible things to be 
allowed to run at large with no sense of their obligation to 
a supreme will and no knowledge of their capacity to fol- 
low its behests. That profound self-respect which the 
Christian parent feels he extends to his children and this 
leads him to seek to inspire rather than compel, to incul- 
cate in them aspiration and initiative rather than mere 
submission or contentment and thus to encourage them 
to become in their turn constituents in the building up of 
the home. Each child is encouraged to make its contribu- 
tion to a higher home life that may become ideal for all 
would-be communities. Here all mutually serve and are 
served, all suffer and rejoice together, bear one another’s 
burdens and share one another’s forgiveness. Thus each 
family aims at becoming the prototype of the family of 
man yet to appear in its glory. 

The influence of the Christian faith in relation to the 
civil community which arose in independence of historical- 
ly Christian forces comes in for consideration at this 
point. Does the Christian spirit operate separately from 
civil communities, and does it tend to a depreciation of 
these or the reverse? The civil community is the family 
writ large. Its development followed two main directions. 


232 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


Either the autocratic spirit of the heads of ancient fami- 
lies was continued in the larger order or the spirit of mu- 
tual fellowship in the family was further developed in the 
civil state. These two types of government have been in 
unceasing conflict. It cannot be said that either has been 
destitute of good. The antagonism between them is the 
antagonism between the lesser and the greater good. It is 
only when the lesser fails to develop into the greater good 
and is therefore set in opposition to it that it becomes an 
evil, a violation of the fundamental principle of all good 
living. 

Loyalty to the organized forms of government is the 
identification of one’s personal good with the customs of 
the people accumulated through successive generations. 
The question of the perpetuity of a people or nation be- 
comes the question of the maintenance of these—but 
more. For it may be that some one or more individuals 
have found, as they think, a higher good than the nation 
has yet made its own and that the way to that higher 
good must be different from any of the traditional ways. 
Should the people fail to discern this, and hence refuse the 
new way offered to it, then, supposing this new good is 
truly good, the nation itself is lost in respect to a life 
higher than its present and the only way for the discover- 
ers of this higher good to save themselves from the nation 
is to create a new community in which this new good is a 
constituent factor. But if the people accept the new good, 
then it is saved by the initiative and enterprise of the in- 
dividual genius. In any case the aim of the individual is 
to communicate his secret and make it a constituent of 
the community life. This is the way in which the Chris- 
tian faith saves the civil community. The community be- 


THE SAVED COMMUNITY 233 


comes the organism through which this higher personality 
gives himself to the world of men. The good of all is 
found in that which is the good of each personality. The 
good of the nation is sought through the full recognition 
of the worth of each individual comprising it and at the 
same time through the recognition of the obligation of 
each to minister to the good of all. And the same is true 
of the Christian internationalism. The worth of each 
nation is indisputable. Individualism is essential to uni- 
versalism. 

The application of these principles to the industrial and 
commercial order is evident. Instead of the mean spirit 
that seeks one’s gain through another’s loss or that re- 
mains indifferent to another’s gain, there enters the play 
of mutual good will and mutual ministry. A man’s busi- 
ness or vocation, whether it be carried on by him as an 
individual or as a member of a corporation, is transformed 
from a means of gain at whatever cost to others into a 
means of furthering the helpful communion of man with 
man. The exchange of goods becomes a medium for the 
higher exchange of the wealth of spirit and the whole be- 
comes a means of building up one another by individual 
and cooperative enterprise. In this way the Christian 
principle tends to the permanence and success of the 
business relation and to the erection of a community 
that is rich in all goods because the material goods are 
transmuted into the abiding wealth for whose sake each 
man lives and for whose sake he must ever seek to com- 
municate his new-found good to all. That is, the industrial 
and commercial system has become a Christian church. 

The outcome is similar when we turn to the adminis- 

tration of law. As the genius of the individual reforms the 


234 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


state in the interests of the higher personality inviting all 
to itself, so also the courts of justice normally present the 
spectacle of ever progressive efforts to bring each member 
of the community to a higher life. Vindictiveness yields 
to the principle of betterment. Even in criminal juris- 
prudence the personality of the criminal, as well as of his 
victim, becomes sacred and the stripes laid upon him be- 
come no longer a mere extortion of an equivalent for a 
wrong done by him but a means of delivering him, as well as 
the othermembers of the community, from the evil inherent 
in his crime. Thus the very punishment he suffers is con- 
struable as a self-inflicted pain for the purpose of estab- 
blishing in his mind, as well as in the minds of others, the 
supreme worth of the personality he has violated. Thus 
the Christian spirit becomes a firm support to the juris- 
prudence of a community and works for its perpetuation. 
In the field of education increase of knowledge is a 
means of awakening in the individual his latent creativity 
in order that, as the teacher imparts his own very self to 
the pupil, the latter may impart a still richer meaning to 
life by making that new knowledge a means of remaking 
the world of men that has seemed to make him. Science 
and philosophy, literature and art become teachers and 
ministers of salvation because they become forms of com- 
munion in the wealth of the universe, which is thereby 
made instrumental to the fulfilment of the potencies of 
the human spirit. The school also becomes a church. 
Thus we see that the Christian faith tends to raise up 
the whole community life of men never-ceasingly from 
baseness and weakness to refinement and strength. The 
natural forms of human association take on a supernat- 
ural character. The secular becomes the holy, the human 


THE SAVED COMMUNITY 235 


divine. The life of the countless multitudes of people be- 
comes a true unity, a true communion of spirit with 
spirit, because each personality in giving himself to all 
creates an endless progressiveness in response to the sum- 
mons of the Perfect Personality to be brought into com- 
munion with himself. 


CHAPTER XI 
THE WORLD TO COME 


And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; 

For the first heaven and the first earth are passed away, 
And the sea is no more. 

And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, 

Coming down out of heaven from God, 

Made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. 

And I heard a great voice out of the throne saying, 

Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, 

And he shall dwell among them, 

And they shall be his peoples, 

And God himself shall be with them. 

And he shall wipe away every tear from their eyes; 

And death shall be no more; 

Neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain, 

any more: 

The first things are passed away. 

And he that sitteth on the throne said, 

Behold, I make all things new. 


Men have always given to the world a place in their 


religious hopes and fears. Even the crudest religions em- 
brace some theory of the beginning or end of the world or 
of such portion of it as comes within their view. When 
men had little knowledge of its forces or of the means of 


controlling them, any event that was accompanied by a 


signal gain or loss was supposed to be the act of a higher 


236 


THE WORLD TO COME 237 


being with good or ill intent. Where there was no thought 
of a single being or power exercising control, neither was 
there the thought of a single system embracing all things. 
The dislocated, disorderly and conflicting happenings 
they witnessed were referred to the whims and fancies, 
the likes and dislikes of the gods or demons having author- 
ity over limited areas and with tempers and aims as dis- 
cordant as their deeds. Security or happiness could be en- 
joyed only within a realm ruled by a deity friendly to its 
inhabitants. No great world-vision was open to the 
worshippers. But when men came to believe in one only 
God and the way was open to them to believe that the 
many worlds or parts of the world constituted a universe, 
an all-embracing world, their interest in their own happi- 
ness was inseparably joined to an interest in the character, 
present and future, of the whole world. Then the great 
question we find ourselves still asking became theirs: Is 
the world friendly? And the answer even of the most in- 
telligent has been by no means always in the affirmative. 

Men commonly hold their gods dearer than the world 
and the desire to know their deities outreaches the desire 
for world-knowledge. It often happens in the case of the 
most serious minded that the thought of God and the 
thought of the world are in discord, and in their moments 
of deepest devotion they seek to exclude the latter wholly 
from the area of the soul’s vision. Few, indeed, can claim 
they have succeeded. The high ecstasy of absorption in 
God is to those to whom it comes a rare experience and it 
is soon followed by a sense of desolation. Regretfully they 
own, “‘the world is too much with us.”’ We can say, then, 
as a matter of actual experience, that men have neither 


238 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


happiness or misery apart from the world’s impact on 
their minds. And why should they? The world and man 
are akin. 

Many of the early Christians, bearing in their souls the 
Jewish recoil from a world whose powers had been so 
often used against them with destructive and almost an- 
nihilating effect, held that the only way to permanent 
purity and peace lay through the fiery destruction of the 
present evil order, with its sin and pain, and the creation 
of a new world of goodness and blessing—a world where 
Sin and Death the prince of evils, shall be no more. Later 
on, many of non-Jewish training found some consolation 
by arguing for the non-reality of the present world. The 
Christian faith, the religion of true enlightenment, as they 
said, saved men from bondage to this false world. As Jew- 
ish apocalypticists had hoped for the annihilation of the 
evil world by fire, so Grecian Gnostics sought its annihila- 
tion by philosophy. As the fire was supposed to be of di- 
vine origin, so also was the true philosophy. But as the 
one hope was bound to be disappointed, so also was the 
other. Men are as little able, in the end, to dispense with 
the worth of the world as they are with its reality. It is 
interesting, to say the least, to observe that our pictures 
of the better world to come always take on the form and 
the color of the present world. We find, on the other hand, 
that a derogatory estimate of the natural world is always 
associated with a derogatory estimate of the natural ways 
of the men whose world it is. The question remains:—Is 
the constitution of the world of physical nature promo- 
tive of the high quality of life which is the ideal of the 
Christian faith? Does the government of the universe call 
for the crucifixion of the good? 


THE WORLD TO COME 239 


Over against the view that the world is friendly to the 
higher life of man there stand certain sombre facts. Sick- 
ness and pain, disappointment and defeat are in some 
measure the lot of all. Nay—they seem to become at last 
the sole inheritance of all. For at the end of the journey 
stands the figure of Death, always dreaded, always repul- 
sive, but always the victor. We connot get reconciled to 
the lordship of this monster. We never cease our efforts to 
overcome it. At the present time we feel so keenly about 
the matter that every slight gain in the average length of 
life is carefully noted by intelligent and progressive races. 
Consequently, the question whether there be a life after 
death has constantly a serious interest for us all. More- 
over, all races have persisted in believing that there is such 
a life even when, as in Buddhism, a pessimistic philosophy 
holds out the possibility of its ceasing. We recall at this 
point the striking words with thich Professor A. Seth 
Pringle-Pattison begins his lectures on Immortality de- 
livered before the University of Edinburgh in the year 
1922. They are these:—‘‘The universality of a belief is no 
sufficient guarantee of its truth. Yet there is something 
very impressive in the unanimity with which man from 
the first dim beginning of his planetary history, has re- 
fused to see in death the end of his being and activities.’’ 
We are compelled to push onward in our enquiry and ask 
whether there be a faith that forcasts for us with certainty 
this coming in upon us of a better world. For no world 
that culminates in death can be better than the present. 


I. BASIS OF THE HOPE OF A LIFE AFTER DEATH 


Why should this hope prove unconquerable? Why 
should the idea of the final extinction of the whole family 


240 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


of man be repulsive? We turn for answer to the great 
human instincts that come to vivid consciousness in the 
Christian. 

1. Amid all the ceaseless changes of life we never quite lose 
the inner assurance that we are really superior to all change. 
Though them all WE persist. After all we do not seem to 
find ourselves in the realm of the transient. Were it true 
that we belong to the things that pass, we could not be 
conscious of the passing. If all things seem to us to belong 
in the end to an unbroken and ordered unity—for this is 
what we all mean by saying there is a world—it is be- 
cause they obtain a place in the ordered unity of our 
minds. We ourselves live through time and are aware that 
we do so. To our view observable things belong to one 
another, but they all belong in their totality to our minds. 
Our minds pertain, therefore, not to the things that are 
ordered in time, but to the eternal. Observe how, in one 
unbroken sweep of thought, we cover vast periods of time, 
how we forecast the future outworking of forces now 
present and securely base our action on the forecast, how 
we unite present, past and future in a single view and sur- 
vey the whole in a glance. We know inwardly that we are 
superior to the succession. Accordingly, we are continual- 
ly exercising the prophetic gift and making the future in 
potency ours even while it is still far away. 

In the next place, the consciousness of an unaccomplished 
task 1s ever ours. The inner imperative that we be ever 
achieving the thing that lies beyond never dies down. No 
sooner is a given task seemingly performed than we find 
it extending away beyond in a new perspective and still 
commanding us to go forward tothe completion ofit. With- 
out this, life would lose its meaning for us. The moment 


THE WORLD TO COME 241 


our task were accomplished further life would be needless. 
Our task, then, must be conceived as endless. This latter 
consideration must be taken in connection with the 
former. We do not merely organize mentally a system of 
facts but invariably enquire after their meaning: Unto 
what do they point? The question of the why, the purpose 
of it all, demands answer as insistently as the question of 
the what and the how. But were our life to cease for ever, 
were it known to us that it is destined for ever to disap- 
pear, that instant it is given a place only with the things 
that think not and purpose not. But life, for us, always zs 
meaningful. Its meaningful character increases with its 
progress. We must conceive ourselves to be eternal or we 
become nothing, nothing but things. 

In the third place, eternity of existence is the necessary 
predicate of our sense of personal worth. Every actual or 
contemplated event is estimated by us from the point of 
view of its bearing upon the well-being of human persons. 
Will it bring them good or will it bring them ill? is the 
final question in all instances. All the other questions we 
may ask about an act or event are tributary to this one 
great question. The Universe is a world of human interest. 
For us it never simply is or is to be. Some predicate of 
worth or unworth must be attached to it. It is either good 
or evil. 

There is nothing else that impresses this upon us so 
forcibly as the presence or the approach of death. I speak 
not so much of one’s anticipation of death to himself as I 
do of the subtle but mighty play of natural affection when 
the life of a loved one—say, one’s child—is threatened. 
What true mother would not give her own life any day to 
save the life of her child? She has found in the child a per- 


242 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


sonality potentially more worthful than her own and she 
readily and intelligently offers up her own as in service to 
the other. Where is the parent who could possibly think of 
his child’s life in a different way? It is in this estimate of 
another personality that truly embraces our own rather 
than in the estimate of one’s own in its exclusiveness, that 
the demand of our nature for immortality manifests its 
power. That which does not claim our allegiance and our 
endeavor for ever cannot claim it at all. 

2. But if death seems so unnatural when we consult 
the deepest longings and the inner potencies of our minds, 
it seems to be a natural event when we view it in connec- 
tion with the regular action of the forces of the outer 
world. Everywhere are graves, graves..All living things 
are—but to die. Nature makes alive but it also kills. It 
was this seeming contradiction between the human self- 
estimate, the human estimate of all other human beings 
and all that can be called personal, that awoke in the 
minds of the rude peoples of the long ago the suspicion 
that some alien and evil power had come surreptitiously 
upon our human life, seduced it from its true purpose, de- 
graded its inner character, and corrupted even the outer 
world in which man must live and find his sustenance. So 
profoundly did this appeal for ages to the oppressive 
sense of the contradiction between what we are and what 
we ought to be, that such an one as John Milton must 
write: 


“Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit 
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste 
Brought death into the world, and all our woe.”’ 


THE WORLD TO COME 243 


If the earth itself was once fair and beautiful and good, 
it has now become the wretched abode of beings as 
wretched as they are evil. Michael, the archangel, assures 
Adam that 


“Their Maker’s image .. . . . then 
Forsook them, when themselves they vilified 
To serve ungoverned appetite; and took 

His image whom they served, a brutish vice, 
Inductive mainly to the sin of Eve. 
Therefore so abject is their punishment.” 


When the angel would make known to Adam the kind of 
world ours has become by sin, 


“Immediately a place 
Before his eyes appeared, sad, noisome, dark; 
A lazar-house it seemed; wherein were laid 
Numbers of all diseased, all maladies 
Of ghastly spasm or racking torture.” 


Even where for a time it seemed that the earth was a 
place of happy beings, Adam is warned, 


“The world ere long a world of tears must weep.” 


Milton powerfully expressed a popular judgment— 
hence the impressiveness of his utterances. Death super- 
venes upon every form of natural pleasure. And yet, if 
Paradise has been lost, it is to be regained. The conviction 
will not down that even if the world seems now to be, or 
truly is, the home of sin and suffering, it is not to be so 
forever. There is a better world to come. 

3. The confidence in the coming of that better world 

(whether it seem a world into which each of us must enter 


244 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


when he meets the death that comes to all, or whether it 
be the universe revealed in the fulness of its meaning as 
that is to be realized in the passing ages)—this confidence, 
I say, is just what we mean by religious faith. Faith sees 
things, not as they are but as they are to be. It is the 
future that gives to the present its meaning. And the 
Christian faith is not to be represented as a power issuing 
from a region alien to the native instincts of our hearts or 
as a mysterious quality interjected into our life from with- 
out. It is truly the concreate energy of our whole being 
making explicit within us the assurance that the world is 
destined to become the home of triumphant goodness. As 
Tertullian said sixteen centuries ago, it is natural, in the 
best sense of the word, to be a Christian. None other is so 
truly at home in this world of nature as the Christian be- 
liever. It is his world. And there is nothing that he may 
suffer at its hands that can extinguish his confidence that 
all things in it work together for his good in the end. We 
are reminded of this great saying of Paul the Apostle: 
‘All things are yours; whether Paul, or Apollis, or Cephas, 
or the world, or life, or death, or things present or things 
to come; all are yours; and ye are Christ’s, and Christ is 
God’s.”’ 7 

But this natural world of ours and that world to 
come for which we hope, are not two separated realms. 
Rather are they to be united in our thoughts because the 
present is seen to be organic to that which is to come. 
And if this be so, we shall not be content to express the 
meaning of that world in the terms that would describe 
the present if it were taken by itself, but we must ever 
seek to set forth the meaning of the present, our “na- 


THE WORLD TO COME 245 


tural’’, world, in the terms of that future, that super- 
natural, world. The worth of that which is reposes on the 
worth of that which is to be. 


II. THE PERSONALITY OF JESUS AND THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 


The various ways in which Christian people have 
sought in the past to verify their hope of a blessed per- 
sonal participation in a better world to come are familiar 
to us all. The fact of a physical resurrection of Jesus has 
been appealed to in substantiation of the Christian claim. 
The form of the argument has varied. In the appeal to the 
Jewish mind it was said that, by raising him from the 
dead and placing him on the throne of the heavens, God 
rewarded him for his faithfulness and assured him and his 
people that at a future date he would return to the earth 
and establish in it the longed for kingdom of righteousness 
and peace. In the appeal to the Greek mind it was said 
that his resurrection was a proof of his Incarnate Deity 
and, hence, of his power to impart to men the incorrupti- 
bility and immortality that pertain only to the Divine. 
In the appeal to the western European mind it was 
affirmed that his resurrection assured men of God’s ac- 
ceptance of his substitutionary suffering of the penalty 
pronounced on guilty men for their sins and thus became 
the basis of their faith in him. 

Without discussing in detail the merits of any of these 
reasonings, it may be pointed out that the significant 
thing in them all is not the form of the argument but the 
faith for which men were seeking an evidential support. 
The faith survives the failure of the argument to carry 
conviction. The outstanding fact throughout is the 


246 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


warmth, the tenderness and the strength of the confidence 
of Christians in the worth of the personality that came into 
our world in Jesus. It is the quality of this faith, rather 
than the arguments for its truth, that enthralls our spirits 
still. The personal attachment of Jesus’ first disciples to 
him as a man preceded their ascription to him of the 
dignities later connected with his name. Coming into 
their lives as he did and filling their minds with hopes and 
purposes, as regards themselves, far above anything they 
had conceived before, it was not possible that they could 
survey his character in a purely objective or disinterested 
way. They felt their whole life and destiny so fully united 
to him that it was not possible for them to separate their 
personal hopes from their trust in him. It is not to be 
supposed that these people had ever consciously sought 
to analyze his character. True it is that, with the prompt- 
ness of that intuition which is the gift of the lowly as 
abundantly as it is the gift of the lofty, they had dis- 
cerned in him that which satisfied their deepest longing for 
an inspiring fellowship. But it would have been difficult, 
perhaps impossible, for them to tell in detail what there 
was in him that won their hearts. It is much the same 
with us even now. 

Many attempts have been made to analyze the character 
of Jesus. These are legitimate and possibly all of them 
helpful. And yet, when we examine the outcome in each 
case, we feel constrained to confess that the secret is not 
out. Indeed, a specious fallacy may underlie these at- 
tempts, to wit, the fallacy that personality is a composite 
of many qualities. It is personality in its wholeness and 
its unity that impresses us. A single great virtue in a 
human being may win us to absolute confidence in him. 


THE WORLD TO COME 247 


For it is the whole man we see in that single quality. One 
who is so distinguished in a great virtue must have the 
other great virtues with it. For virtues never stand alone. 
We shrink from the attempt to analyze the character of 
Jesus as one shrinks from an ‘analysis of his mother’s 
character. It has not been otherwise with the Christian 
attitude to Christ through the ages. 

What those early disciples had found, then, was not 
simply the perfect character in Jesus that would challenge 
criticism during the coming centuries—true though this 
may be—but it was a fellowship they had found, a fellow- 
ship that promised to them an infinite and eternal good, 
so that, when the contingency of their being separated 
from him by their own act was suggested by him, the 
only possible answer of their hearts was the question, 
‘“To whom shall we go but to thee?’’—truly an unanswer- 
able question. Hence we may understand something of the 
horror with which the judicial murder that took him away 
from them filled their minds. Their whole destiny for 
time and eternity, which they had come to cherish with 
unutterable joy, was apparently swept away in that terri- 
ble hour that saw him die. With him destroyed, there was 
nothing left to live for. 

It is only when our loved ones and our angels of mercy 
are taken from us that we become aware of their worth. 
It is always so, and it was so with them at that time. His 
greatness, his goodness, his holiness grew on them with 
the passing of the days and with the recollection of what 
he had said and done and suffered. The glory of a moun- 
tain height is not revealed to our eyes until we stand back 
at a distance from it on the plains below. It was his separ- 
ation from them that revealed to them the ineffable 


248 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


grandeur of the fellowship they had had with him in the 
days when he was so near to them, when he opened to 
them the scriptures and set the word of God in their 
hearts. It had brought them into a new fellowship with 
one another. It had bound them together in a new hope 
and a new purpose. The vision of the extension of this 
fellowship into all the world slowly rose before their eyes 
and began to fill them with rapture. He had given the 
vision and he would fulfill the prophecy it contained. 
With him they were “ready to go to prison and to death.” 

Was all this lost in a frenzy of despair when he was 
slain? It might seem so, at the first glance. But it was not 
so. They had been made a new company of people. Their 
fellowship with one another remained and it was filled 
with the sweetness which they had found in fellowship 
with him. This and their hope for the better world were 
found unconquered by his death. Had he not said so to 
them in those utterances, cryptic at the time, when he told 
them that the Son of Man must suffer at the hands of his 
foes and be put to death? Hope and confidence quickly 
revived as they realized his and their supremacy over the 
men who had slain him. The very possibility of suffering 
as he had done and for the same cause ashe, was clothed in 
the garments of a holy joy. They had become heirs of a 
life that conquered death. His death had revealed the new 
meaning which Jesus had put into life. Had he not invited 
them to share in his death and in the triumph that was to 
follow? The whole of life and the whole world in which it 
was lived took on a new meaning for them. They had not 
lost the Master by death. The rather, they had truly 
found him. He was with them still in all the graciousness 
and power of a life eternal. The fellowship with him was 


THE WORLD TO COME 249 


unbroken and unmarred. Nay—it was nearer and dearer 
than before. It was imperishable and would fill eternity. 
It may well be that in the high ecstasy of these high ex- 
iences they were confirmed in their confidence by visions 
of his presence which one and another of them, or even a 
whole assembled company of them, enjoyed. But the 
reason why the visions of his presence with them again 
lived as an abiding consolation and assurance, whilst the 
visions of the presence of other departed ones died away, 
was that their apprehension of his worth to mankind was 
of vaster significance than a multitude of visions could be, 
because it came from the revelation of a personality that 
is indispensable and imperishable. It was “impossible 
that he should be holden of death.’’ Here is the ancient 
disciples’ faith in him and in themselves. However they 
might express it (for, like ourselves, they were men of 
their time and country, and spoke in the accepted term- 
inology and within the area of thought current among 
them)—what Jesus’ death brought to them was more than 
the issue whether the individual man Jesus was dead for 
all time or alive in bodily form somewhere in the spaces of 
the sky. The issue at stake was, whether the whole mean- 
ing of life which he had communicated to them was false, 
whether the God of Jesus in whom they trusted was the 
true and living God, whether the hope of a kingdom of 
grace and righteousness and truth, heading up in such a 
personality as his, was ever to come to fulfilment. His 
death of shame was turned into glory as they became in- 
spired with the assurance that his aims were undefeated 
and that the holy communion of his spirit with theirs was 
unbroken still and must continue forever in the kingdom 


250 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


that was to come. Instead of being turned back from the 
purpose to which he had called them, they were now fully 
committed to it and were confirmed in it. 

The classical utterance of this faith is found in the 
language of Paul in his letter to the Romans:—“If we 
have become united in the likeness of his death, we shall 
be also in the likeness of his resurrection: knowing this, 
that our old man was crucified with him, that the body of 
sin might be done away, that so we should be no longer 
in bondage to sin; for he that hath died is justified from 
sin. But if we died with Christ we believe that we shall 
also live with him; knowing that Christ, being raised from 
the dead, dieth no more; death no more hath dominion over 
him. For the death that he died he died unto sin once; but 
the life that he liveth he liveth unto God. Even so reckon 
ye yourselves to be dead unto sin, but alive unto God in 
Jesus Christ.’? He who wholly dies to sin is forever alive 
unto God. It is not to be supposed that many of these 
early believers were capable of expressing their faith in 
this Pauline language. Their early mental environment 
had been far different from his. Nor is it to be supposed 
that the whole meaning of faith in the crucified Redeemer 
can now be put into these thoughts of Paul. The magni- 
tude of this faith has been increasingly disclosed with the 
passing of the centuries. But already in this Pauline image- 
ry ‘of the death and resurrection of Jesus we are carried 
far beyond the kind or measure of assurance that a few 
broken and disconnected physical ‘‘appearances’’ could 
bestow. Be it repeated, the question of a visible physical 
resurrection of Jesus from the ground and of a similar 
physical ascension into some place in physical space, 
there to remain concealed from view till he come back 


THE WORLD TO COME 251 


again; the question of his return in the same physical 
system to live a physical life again on this physical earth 
in company with those who should still be here living 
their physical lives; and the question whether those de- 
parted believers who had been meanwhile lying in their 
graves were to live on this earth once more, are not the 
questions that concern us now. The questions we must ask 
are these:—Has Jesus Christ brought into the area of our 
life a spiritual fellowship superior to the power of all 
possible eventualities, even death itself, to overthrow or 
weaken? Do we constantly participate in this fellowship? 
Is this spiritual kingdom already established in this uni- 
verse of God’s? Have we so entered into the mind of Jesus 
when he gave himself for men in death that this kingdom, 
in the end, means for us what it meant for him? The ques- 
tion of a cosmic salvation becomes therefore, the question 
of a destiny in which the whole universe shall be mani- 
festly tributary to the fulfilment of a universal holy fellow- 
ship. Can we thus think of the world? 
Here, then, is the point where modern science and phil- 
osophy find their affinity with the Christian faith. They 
are gradually arriving at a demonstration, as a practical 
certainty, of the truth of the faith which holds that all the 
forces of the physical world fulfil their purpose only when 
they are made instrumental to the realization of the 
worth of personality. Here is the very heart of the Chris- 
tian view of the world. Hence death itself, as a cosmic 
event, must minister to that end. Salvation is cosmic. The 
world is the field for the manifestation of the saving grace 
of God. 
At this point we recall the moral leaders among the men 
of old to whom this present life of mankind seemed so far 


252 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


inferior to what it ought to be and the events that befall 
men in the physical world so contrary to their good that 
both must be the fruit of some pristine deed of evil. Man- 
kind must have fallen from an earlier state of true good- 
ness and the world had been subjected to corruption in 
consequence. Man, even in his evil state, was in kinship 
with the world. In these thoughts may we not discern the 
anticipatory working of the ideal personality and the 
ideal world, even though the ideal was placed in the dis- 
tant past rather than in the future? And may we not find 
in Paul’s words a deeper meaning than even Paul himself 
was able to put into them when he said: “‘I reckon that 
the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be 
compared with the glory that shall be revealed to usward. 
For the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the 
revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was sub- 
jected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of him 
who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also shall 
be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the 
liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know 
that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain 
together until now. And not only so, but we ourselves 
groan within ourselves, waiting for our adoption, the re- 
demption of our body.’”’ The movement in the spirit of 
man and the movement in the world around man are felt 
to be of the same ultimate character because a single ideal 
purpose is being wrought out in both. Man’s struggle to 
gain the better life to come is an index to the meaning of 
all that seems so untoward in the universe. That better 
life is to be fulfilled in the better world to come. Men are 
not saved from the world or apart from it but in and with 
it. The redemptive process is finally cosmic. 


THE WORLD TO COME 253 


If so, may we not then go on to say that the “‘groanings”’ 
of our spirit for deliverance from the evil within may be 
turned into the inspiration of hope and these painful long- 
ings be transformed into a holy confidence of attainment 
the moment one’s mind turns to the love of God that 
came to men ‘“‘in Christ Jesus our Lord?” Personality is 
supreme in the world by right. Even to our half-blinded 
minds it is plain that the universe, in the unity of its 
processes, must be truly ministrant to the unfolding, in all 
moral beings, of the character of God, the Ultimate Per- 
sonality. And if the personality of Jesus Christ reveals to 
us the character of the One Supreme Being, then may we 
say again with Paul, ‘‘I am persuaded that neither death, 
nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, 
nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, 
nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from 
the love of God.” 

The longing for an immortality that is to embrace the 
whole race, the desire for a personal immortality for the 
sake of the universal service which it opens to our souls, 
is not to be satisfied by mere information which some one 
may be supposed to possess on this subject. Such “‘infor- 
mation could be truly meaningful only to him whose soul 
is inspired with the longing for the infinitely worthfullife, 
and such an one needs no information. Sufficient for him 
is the consciousness of an all-embracing love. For that 
nothing can annihilate. The certainty of the coming of 
that better world is a moral certainty and no other is 
needed. | 


254 CHRISTIAN SALVATION 


I bring this thesis to a close with George Matheson’s 
confession in verse of a faith which is my own: 


“O Love that wilt not let me go, 
I rest my weary soul in thee; 
I give thee back the life I owe, 
That in thine ocean depth its flow 
May richer, fuller be. 


O Light that followest all my way, 
I yield my flickering torch to thee; 
My heart restores its borrowed ray, 
That in thy sunshine’s blaze its day 
May brighter, fairer be. 


O Joy that seekest me through pain, 

I cannot close my heart to thee; 
I trace the rainbow through the rain, 
And feel the promise is not vain 

That morn shall tearless be. 


O Cross that liftest up my head, 
I dare not ask to fly from thee; 

I lay in dust life’s glory dead, 

And from the ground there blossoms red 
Life that shall endless be.”’ 






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